About this Playlist
Nu jazz, what is it, where did it start, is it even a real musical genre, is it the same as acid jazz, hang on was that even a genre, well I can confidently answer that, no it wasn’t, acid jazz was more of a scene and the bunch of records that were played by the likes of Gilles Peterson were then called tongue in check ‘acid jazz records’, although some were new, most of the came from different times but fitted the sound of the scene, a pushback to the sound of acid house, the sounds coming from many existing genres, soul, jazz, funk, fusion and afrobeat.
As the scene and other similar club nights developed across the country, young producers and artists began to create music influenced by what they heard, the acid jazz label was quickly formed in 1987 to cater to the creative explosion in a new unique British music sound by Eddie Piller and Gilles Peterson, the first track was ‘Fredric Lies Still’ by Galliano, commercial success came with the ‘Brand New Heavies’ some amazing compilations like the ‘Totally Wired’ series, like the soul scenes that came before, many old but not quite forgotten artists were given a new lease of life like Terry Callier.
It was the sound, alongside house and hip hop of the late 80’s – early 90’s but with artists as diverse Jamiroquai, Snowboy, Corduroy, Dianne Brown and Barrie K Sharpe, you couldn’t not shouldn’t pigeon hole it all into a made up, non descriptive genre like acid jazz, the music was being released by more than one label and eventually Gilles Peterson left to start ‘Talkin Loud’ the music again took a different direction.
The music to emerge from was still heavily influenced by soul, jazz and funk, but also with the newer genres of house and hip hop, many a new name or sub genre came and went for these new sounds and the transformations from instrumental jazz funk to the sound of broken beat in later years were as distinctive as anything in the early days.
So in keeping with the theme and the difficulty of attempting to shoe horn 1000’s of artists and close to fifty years of musical influences into just one name for music that combines all the foundations of dance or black music, but with its strongest links to jazz, but what is jazz, well it’ll take a bit longer brief to explain that, when a journalist asked Louis Armstrong to define the genre “if you don’t feel it, you’ll never know it”, Miles Davis calling it “protest music”, but for me Herbie Hancock describes it best explains how it “adopts influences from other cultures and genres while at the same time strongly influencing them”.
So like it’s original source jazz, this music I’m talking about combines parts of everything that went before, but continually inspires new forms and styles, then soaks them up, in a endless cycle of creativity that keeps repeating, we’ve now got Jazz not Jazz, Brit Jazz, there was the US sound of Mushroom Jazz from DJ Mark Farina, the club night Jelly Jazz that sought the spirit of the early acid jazz parties, commonly the style is now called jazztronica or nu jazz. p
The biggest dancefloor sound that has emerged from the many years of jazz’s meddling in the music is broken beat, a true U.K. sound that takes all of the above, breaks it down and puts it all back together again with a fresh sound aimed at the discerning dancer and music fan.
This playlist is a very small selection of the more pitched down, slightly slower tempo hoof shaking tracks.