MEET KASSA OVERALL: VIRTUOSO DRUMMER, RAP CONFESSOR, BACKPACK JAZZ PRODUCER!
KASSA OVERALL can pinpoint the exact moment he gambled on a solo career. “In January 2017 I stopped drinking and booked some time at Strange Weather Studios,” says the 40-year-old from his garden shed in Seattle, a space rammed with keyboards, drums and recording ephemera. “I wanted to make an album that mixed my jazz background with my production and hip-hop background. I’d never mixed the worlds together – it was almost like my professional thing and my just-for-fun thing. After that session I knew I had something.”
The son of an ethnomusicologist mother and saxophonist father, by his teens Overall was drumming professionally at jazz shows, expressing his hip-hop skills on the side by rapping over OutKast instrumentals. After studying jazz drums and music theory at Oberlin Conservatory under Billy Hart (part of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi), Overall became a fixture on New York’s jazz circuit, playing with Ravi Coltrane, Geri Allen and Jon Batiste, but in 2019 he emailed his bandleaders. “I said I wouldn’t be available to tour as I was putting out an album and needed room to let it cook.”
Overall’s uninhibited approach bypassed previous jazz/rap fusions on that year’s debut
Go Get Ice Cream And Listen To Jazz. Armed with just a laptop, an audio interface and a microphone, the self-styled ‘backpack jazz producer’ biked around NYC to record collaborations he would chop up and reconstruct later.
Overall’s star really started to rise with 2020 follow-up I Think I’m Good, with confessionals touching on his own mental health struggles. “I was expressing what got me to where I am and getting comfortable sharing that. It was a therapeutic process.”
With its trippy sound collages and fractal soundscapes, new LP Animals is Overall’s most sure-footed yet. “Everybody else had to deal with these mental health questions with Covid, so this album is more outward – not so much about me in my head, but me against the world.” Not that its gestation was easy. “The process is kinda absurd,” he says, waving one of several hard-drives of unused material in the air. “I make so much stuff, but it takes a long, long time to get it to sound right. When I make an album it’s like a movie – not so much a collection of songs but a whole story that fits together.” Edited with an auteur’s technical surety, guests including Laura Mvula, Danny Brown and Vijay Iyer help flesh-out miniatures that invariably contain multitudes.
“There’s a lot of great music today, but so much is retro,” Overall says, “it takes a lot of work to do something innovative.
But if you build your own unique house, it’s never going to go out of style.”
“This album is not so much about me in my head, but me against the world.” KASSA OVERALL