Unique and exciting music is in itself incredibly rare, let alone music that is actually revolutionary. Give credit to Jay Are for referencing great music of the past and taking inspiration from it, but it is a little unclear as to what Jay Rawls [click to read] and John Robinson [click to read] thought was particularly revolutionary about Jazz. The 1960’s Jazz Revolution Again is Hip Hop with a smooth, traditional Jazz backing and positive lyrics decrying the shallowness of contemporary Rap as well as modern culture in general. In the strictest sense of the term, this is “grown-folks” music, not because it is particularly mature or complex but because it takes itself seriously, places studiousness before playfulness, and conserves energy to the point that many tracks have a noticeable uniformity.
The hook to one track, “Jazz Unconditional,” states that the duo loves “Jazz unconditional, no if’s, and’s, or but’s / Nothing’s too difficult.” And nothing too difficult is exactly what you will find on the majority of the album’s 14 tracks. After a fairly promising start with “It’s Jay Are,” a light-hearted and airy track that tells the pair’s origin story the album quickly falls into a mid-tempo rut that it rarely pulls itself out of. In fact the listener is forced to sit through four near-identical tracks all featuring essentially the same structure, tinkling pianos, occasionally horn or guitar runs, and a soft, barely-there beat, before it gets anything that could be called enthusiastic. One of these tracks, “Type Sounds,” features the line “Smooth ebony key strokes, melodic / Ivory tones just to balance out the sonics.” This is on a record that features the word revolutionary in the title and that deliberately harkens back to a time when people such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy where making some of the most complex and confrontational music in history? The music on most of the tracks here seems to be better suited for living rooms and dinner parties, places where people go to relax and feel safe. And that is essentially what this music is: safe, tasteful. It’s not all bad, though. There are tracks that are worth the listeners’ time, though even these are far from revolutionary. “Music Forever” is forceful and features an energetic, poly-rhythmic beat. “Love Me Good” augments its sparse beat with rhythmic vinyl crackles to great effect. And on “Shooting Smack” the group and welcome guest lyricist K Banger use clever drug metaphors and specific references to fallen Jazz legends to expose the myth that heroin is what made those men the geniuses they were. But tracks like those just mentioned are in short supply and so much of the album sounds the same that after a while it feels as though one is listening to one long, repetitive, and, above all, conservative jam session.
It is inarguable that Jay Are have altruistic intentions. They want the Jazz past to be remembered, as the aural history lesson of “The Lee Morgan Story” makes clear, and they want to connect it to Hip Hop. But they go about it in the wrong way. They seek to align themselves with revolutionary Jazz greats from the past but they forget to instill their music with any inventiveness; even a little less reverence and a little more energy could have helped rescue this project. Because, all told, what we have here is a harmless tribute, an exercise in nostalgia, a revival. But a revival can never truly be revolutionary.
