Montreal hip-hoppers to play jazz fest
10-piece has a wide swath of inf luences
What’s a hip-hop band doing at a jazz festival?
Lou Piensa, co-founder of Montreal’s Nomadic Massive, makes a good case for the 10-member collective’s visit to Edmonton’s jazz fest Saturday.
“The short answer is that jazz festivals around the world are opening up their programs to music other than classical jazz,” he argues, “but the longer answer is that hip hop has a very strong link to the jazz music tradition. A lot of hip hop was based on the art of sampling, trying to create something without a lot of instruments, and jazz has played a huge role in the samples that have been used throughout hip-hop history.”
Piensa is one of five vocalists in Nomadic Massive, along with players on guitar, bass and drums, and guests on sax and trumpet for the current Canadian tour. They’re all jazz fans.
“We discovered a lot of jazz through our parents or through hip-hop samples of Duke Ellington, Donald Byrd and other artists,” he says. “We see hip hop as a continuation of that tradition.”
It’s been 10 years now since Piensa and a coterie of friends from Montreal’s hip-hop scene found themselves in Cuba to guest at a hip-hop festival there. The event was cancelled when a hurricane hit shortly beforehand, but time off gave the musicians and wordsmiths an unexpected chance to collaborate — and that fostered a collective energy.
“When we came back, we wanted to keep it going, and things took off from there,” he says.
A few others joined on and, months later, Nomadic Massive’s first EP was recorded.
Varied international origins speak to the band’s breadth of influences. Either by birth or as children of immigrants, the members have ties to Argentina, Algeria, Chile, China, Haiti and the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. Piensa was born in France but spent years growing up in Cuba. The rappers and singers in the group deliver words primarily in English but also in French, Spanish and Arabic. Tours to Brazil, France and throughout the United States have also left an imprint.
You can hear many ingredients percolating in the mix on Any Sound, the band’s 2013 EP and fifth release overall. They hope to have another full-length album out by year’s end, and this tour offers a chance to try out some new material live.
The presence of five vocalists insures that the content of Nomadic Massive’s songs can be as varied as the musical elements. Their working process has a lot to do with that.
“We have a lot of different people contributing,” Piensa says, “so there’s a lot of different opinions and life experiences that come out. How we bring it together sometimes comes out of complete improv. I’ll have a verse and somebody else has a verse that matches up and a theme comes out of that. Or, sometimes we actually think of a theme that’s important to us and work on it together.”
Even so, there are some recurring themes.
“We’re all involved in community work,” he says, “and we work a lot with young people, young adults and teenagers, so there are a lot of social issues that they face that are important to us. That’s important, because we grew up on hip hop that was very politicized, that had a social consciousness. At the same time, we’re very much about the festive celebration of music.”
Hip-hop fans will want to hit the OSPAC early Saturday. Local group Politic Live performs in the free Emerging Artists series at 6:30 p.m. before Nomadic Massive goes on at 8 p.m.