It is though. And I kinda resent how around 2007, everybody who had previously flown the flag for jazz set to light house beats kinda started doing other things that have nothing to do with either jazz or light house beats. How the fuck do you go from Jazzanova to Flying Lotus?* The answer is hip cover art, I know, but anyways...
First off, broken beat is music everybody can agree on. Its got a hip pedigree, evolving as it did from the UK jazz dance scene of the 80s and then from the acid jazz scene of the 90s... Plot the broken beat hotspots on a map of the world, and what you basically end up with is a constellation made up of the hippest musical metropoleis on the planet... London, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, New York. Broken beat put out its fair share of drool-worthy rare vinyl, and what I would call a disproportionately huge pool of mixes that even DJ nerds would have trouble finding fault with (insist on being a bitch about this point and I'll dig up that Jazztronik live mix that takes an hour to build up to Thousand Finger Man). And if you want spillover into other equally cool musical happenings, look no further... Larry Heard, Louie Vega, Lee Collins, Ron Trent, the original disciples of house music embraced it and wasted no time incorporating it into a gospel of trimmed back house deepness and rare disco chic that provided a vision of house to come to us hardcore house nerds.
But I would be quite the snob if I were to limit the "everybody" I'm hinging my first of three or so points on to people who understood the above namedropping. And that's what's kinda nuts about NJ/BB. Readers who don't know what the hell I'm talking about when I say Nu Jazz/Broken Beat, check your own CD rack... chances are, you've got a disc with some stellar examples: any double CD impulse buy from the first half of the last decade with the words "Lounge", "Cafe", "Hôtel" "Brazil" and a double-digit number in the title is bound to pack at least a few gems from Truby Trio, Kyoto Jazz Massive, Nicola Conte, Atjazz, Jazzanova, Quantic... Then there's 4Hero. Everybody has at least one 4Hero disc gathering dust somewhere.
Which brings me to my second point: broken beat really put the boutique in "boutique pop". In Europe at least, the early 2000s were all about schnazzy music becoming much bigger than anybody would have thought possible. They're the reason why today, you can casually drop the word "boutique pop" in a conversation without really knowing what exactly you're trying to say and just kind of assume the person you're talking to will be able to follow. That's why we love them. And if Gorillaz and Daft Punk were the American Apparel and Abercrombie & Fitch of boutique pop, respectively (I'm going to bask in the glory of that painfully subtle Daft Punk diss all summer long, BTW), then Nu Jazz/Broken Beat was A Bathing Ape: almost too cool to be as utilitarian and generally agreeable as it was. Much like how a Bathing Ape seamlessly blended museum-grade pop art with t-shirts and hoodies you'd actually want to wear, so broken beat took cues from some of the world's most legit DJ cultures to put out CDs you'd be happy to swipe from your musically less inclined friends and family members.
Lastly, broken beat is happy place music. Whether it sounds like it could be coming out of a speaker tucked behind a fountain at a bar on Mykonos or out of a DJ setup on a rooftop in Tokyo, broken beat never fails to evoke those laidback twentysomething moments, both real and imagined, spent being brutally overcharged for beverages and not caring at all. That may not make any sense at all, but frankly, neither did my twenties. And it's weird: as time goes by, the drugged out moments spent on dimly dancefloors in the company of the spirit of Larry Levan become less and less accessible, while the ones spent at Charles de Gaulle, sitting on a luggage cart, watching girls, eating a 6€ croissant and listening to a 4Hero mix on a fat, not-so-solid state ipod that clicks when it's looking for a song seem more and more profound.
While a lot of these sentiments have been bubbling under for years now, this whole post isn't out of the blue. Broken beat and nu jazz have been getting quite a few nods as of late. "Comeback" is a yucky word, and if the re-re-re-rediscovery of disco is anything to go by, let's hope it can be avoided. BB/NJ after all did its thing within a musical mileu very different than the one we're in now.
On the other hand, boutique pop seems to be picking up... much like the general economic climate, inerestingly enough (that would answer quite a few questions about BP's all too sudden disappearance around 2007). Like a €150 t-shirt, just like that, Broken Beat and Nu Jazz could start to make sense again.
Some recent stuff:
To commemorate the World Cup, the boys at Compost Records have put out a compilation that, much like the Broken Beat and Nu Jazz gems featured on it, loosely references the land of syncopation and beach bars. Nearly 4 hours of music, unmixed, for €9... and it's called Compost Brazil Seleção 2014. I'm guessing that Compost, being all serious and German, decided at the last minute to scrap the stylized luggage tag cover art. Either way, the nod to the sound's more consumer aspects (see above) is hard to miss. If compiling album of the year lists weren't a contest in lying through one's teeth (and, well, if compilations of old material counted), this would be my album of the decade.
To commemorate the World Cup, the boys at Compost Records have put out a compilation that, much like the Broken Beat and Nu Jazz gems featured on it, loosely references the land of syncopation and beach bars. Nearly 4 hours of music, unmixed, for €9... and it's called Compost Brazil Seleção 2014. I'm guessing that Compost, being all serious and German, decided at the last minute to scrap the stylized luggage tag cover art. Either way, the nod to the sound's more consumer aspects (see above) is hard to miss. If compiling album of the year lists weren't a contest in lying through one's teeth (and, well, if compilations of old material counted), this would be my album of the decade.
Theo Parrish has teamed up with one half of 4Hero to make a track that's more like three-fourths 4Hero. "Let's make the straight jazz at the beginning a little more brooding... and let's make it 11 minutes long," could very well have been the extent of his input. But whatever Miles Davis once said about the notes he doesn't play, too many chefs, less is more... Theo and Dego kill it. When they ask, you can just say it's 4Hero... and if they're not impressed, throw in "Detroit" somewhere in there. And they suck.
Nu Jazz virtuoso and retrogaming enthusiast Atjazz has been doing his thing throughout. His newer sounds point towards that dark, I'm gonna say "contemplative" house music that's all the rage with the kids these days. [Complete sidebar to change the subject] So, anyways, like I was saying, I follow Atjazz on Facebook, and a few days ago he posted a link to this set that this guy found. All Broken Beat, all vinyl (the DJ setup is described in detail in the description, on the off chance that some kid should happen to think Nu Jazz doesn't go hard, I assume), from 2002. London. That's pretty much it. *Fapfapfap
