Make That Jazz Bounce
ISSUE #234
Last week was the first time I've ever skipped a week of Earwyrms. I’d like to say it was a reward for this newsletter’s five year anniversary next week, but really, I just forgot. See, I was in New Orleans, a city of warped time and misplaced hours. A city of ancient magic and forward thinking. The city of jazz, and the city of bounce.
Bounce is a type of dance music so completely fused to New Orleans it could be on the flag next to the Sazerac. At first, bounce was mixed live, like most early hip hop, for parties on blocks and in basements in the late 1980s. This live performance usually had a call-and-response element, which later was baked into the genre via manic, repeated sampling that sounds like the DJ is playing paddleball on the sampler button. The genre started with “Where Dey At” by MC T. Tucker & DJ Irv and “Sister Sister” by Silky Slim, ascended to a higher profile through DJ Jubilee, and then finally arrived at the mainstream’s doorstep via Mannie Fresh at Cash Money Records (Lil Wayne, of course, is New Orleans royalty). Since then, it has grown through the likes of Katey Red, Magnolia Shorty, Flipset Fred, Sissy Nobby, and Big Freedia.
New Orleans jazz, or, more specifically, dixieland, is a hybrid of ragtime and blues featuring some of the greatest brass players on Earth—Louis Armstrong, King Ory, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton. It was the first form of jazz ever pressed to commercial recordings in the 1910s. It’s tied inextricably to the marching band—think “Saints Go Marching In”—and bears the kind of radical tempo and counterpoint inherent to music that makes you move.
When I was trying to decide whether to highlight bounce or jazz for the New Orleans issue, I heard foundational similarities. So I thought, “Why not highlight both?” You can hear dixieland jazz’s verve in the bounce music that came later. Both came from the irrepressible hunger to move, the desperate need to usurp polite society—the inevitably, if you will, of that ass to shake itself.
Hear it for yourself; I’ve laced the two genres together here. Dare you not to move.
There are now roving bands of sonic scavengers in the fractured data gutters of the post–Web 2.0 internet, musicians often known by little more than alt-code symbols (♡u∫agi幻覚∀∁ⓛᙌ✬) or keyboard vomit (Sophiaaaahjkl;8901). These boundary pushers are chopping and screwing so hard it sounds like a chainsaw, their samples reduced to little more by the end than glitter and stardust.