This month: Butcher Brown
You could stick a ‘jazz’ label on Butcher Brown, but the five-piece collective are likely to have peeled it off by the time you next hear from them. Downbeat magazine described their 2014 debut, All Purpose Music, as ‘groove buoyed and genre subversive’.
Their newest, Butcher Brown Presents Triple Trey featuring Tennishu and R4ND4ZZO BIGB4ND, is a spectacular fusion of classic big band sounds and hiphop. A seemingly improbable pairing, it makes perfect sense for a group that grew up in Richmond, Virginia, US. ‘There’s a tradition of big bands in Richmond. They’re always present. But they’ve developed a modern sound, with traditional instrumentation,’ says producer/ instrumentalist DJ Harrison.
What started as a passion project for bassist/composer Andrew Randazzo (‘to hone my writing chops a little bit’) took on a new dimension just after trumpeter, saxophonist and MC Marcus ‘Tennishu’ Tenney had released his own hiphop album. ‘It was simply, “You got a big band and I got a rap album – let’s put it together with Butcher Brown as the rhythm section and I’ll rap the songs”,’ Tennishu says.
‘We’ve been together for over ten years and we have trust in one another when we bring fresh ideas in. None of us wants to micromanage,’ says drummer Corey Fonville. Everyone has wide-ranging taste. Right now Fonville has Miles Davis’s mid-’60s quintet side-by-side with nu-jazz duo Domi and JD Beck on his playlist: ‘Like Miles Davis, what we put into our music represents the current times.’
‘The legacy stuff is deeply engrained because it is where we all came from – jazz school,’ adds guitarist Morgan Burrs. ‘It’s a mix and we all believe what we are doing is a continuation of jazz.’
Tennishu thinks that hiphop has long been a gateway into jazz for younger people, because of the samples it used: ‘It was like a young person taking an older person’s words and reshaping them for their generation.’
Butcher Brown’s explosive new album, which is more hiphop than big band, might actually reverse the flow – and give straightahead jazz lovers a taste for rap and hiphop. Garry Booth
‘Like Miles Davis, what we put into our music represents the current times’