Present-day jazz
Chris Parkin delves into the contemporary-jazz scene and finds the genre being morphed by forward-thinking and intensely creative sounds springing up across the globe…
GENRE HOPPING
Chris Parkin
It’s rare that present-day jazz gets any attention beyond the usual jazzosphere. Just ask Scandinavia’s Mats Gustafsson and Nils Petter Molvær. They’ve been making the most forwardthinking jazz music around, for well over a decade, to mainstream indifference. But when Kendrick Lamar introduced Thundercat and Kamasi Washington to the world on 2015’s To Pimp A Butterfly, knitting their exploratory sounds into something palatable for wider audiences, music fans turned genrefluid almost overnight.