Celebrating Black Music Through Jazz

Each June, Black Music Month gives us the opportunity to celebrate the wealth of innovation and emotion Black artists deliver through music. This year, Apple Music centers its Black Music Month celebration in jazz, one of Black America’s richest musical legacies and an art form whose roots continue to bear fruit today. We’ve curated collections of music focusing on the role jazz has played—and continues to play—in genres like hip-hop, rock, R&B and soul, and dance and electronic music. Join us this Black Music Month as we celebrate the wholly original art, influence, and joy that jazz provides with albums, playlists, and radio episodes spotlighting heroes of jazz then and now.

Back in 1991, an ascendent hip-hop group called A Tribe Called Quest released their sophomore album The Low End Theory, a project that emphasized a sound the group felt they’d need to sell to hip-hop fans at large. “The tranquility will make ya unball your fist/For we put hip-hop on a brand-new twist,” Q-Tip rapped. The song was “Jazz (We’ve Got),” and beyond that, the group and its engine—producer and MC Q-Tip—were proud jazz disciples, raised, by Tip’s own admission, on the hard bop of giants like Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. Hip-hop is spiritually descended from jazz, and in some cases also genetically—Queens-hailing legend Nas is the son of cornetist Olu Dara. Jazz records have provided the backbone for some of hip-hop’s most recognizable samples, but we can also hear jazz in the drumming of The Roots’ Questlove, the MCing of Common and Chance the Rapper, and the production of beatsmiths like Madlib and the dearly departed J Dilla. When legendary duo Gang Starr dissolved and Guru split from one of the most impactful producers of all time, DJ Premier, the MC’s rebrand was Jazzmatazz. Jazz elder statesmen, too, have made good on this relationship, like when Miles Davis sought out the production work of Easy Mo Bee (of 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. fame) to create the Grammy Award-winning album Doo-Bop. And if we’re talking Grammys, how could we forget Kendrick Lamar’s Best Rap Album-winning To Pimp a Butterfly, a project that features contributions from contemporary jazz flag-bearers Robert Glasper and Terrace Martin. It’d be reductive, if not disingenuous, to proclaim that hip-hop is jazz, but to borrow a phrase from street parlance, they couldn’t be closer if they were blood.

As is the case with any number of things concerning jazz post-1970, we can’t really talk about the relationship between it and electronic music without talking about Herbie Hancock. A preternaturally talented pianist, Hancock came up under the tutelage of Miles Davis. It was Davis, in fact, who pushed Hancock to use an electric piano, nourishing a then nascent but almost inevitable dedication to technology as a pioneer and early adopter. (Also, one of Hancock’s undergraduate degrees is in electrical engineering.) The albums Hancock would release in the ’70s and ’80s—titles like Head Hunters, Sextant, Sunlight, and Future Shock—routinely featured the latest keyboard or synthesizer available and were groundbreaking both sonically and philosophically. Along with Davis and Ornette Coleman, Hancock was at the forefront of what would come to be termed nu jazz, and he would go on to leave his mark in funk, disco, R&B, pop, and hip-hop. His practice was the groundwork for the kind of production and musical inclination we hear in artists like Robert Glasper, Duval Timothy, Shabaka Hutchings, and Squarepusher. To let Hancock tell it, though, it’s a case of right person, right place, right time. “Black music, as in all music, reflects life and is affected by the times in which the songs were written or recorded,” he told Apple Music back in 2020. “Jazz, being highly improvisatory, lifts the art form to new levels of direct connection to the moment and the times as a shared experience with the members of the band and, in some ways, with the audience.” In other words, we’re all welcome.

The March 2023 passing of composer and sax great Wayne Shorter was a tough loss for music fans the world over, but one of the most endearing testaments to his legacy came from folk-rock legend Joni Mitchell. “He was mystical,” Mitchell wrote in a personal statement posted to her website. “He was the only musician that I could direct metaphorically or theatrically. I would say to him, ‘Come in here and get out here. Then come in really sad, and by the time you get to here …get really young.’ And he would play that! Or, I’d tell him, ‘Okay, Wayne, you're the bird.’ So he'd go out in the studio, put his horn in his mouth, and the first lick that came out of him was so like a bird. It was amazing.” Mitchell mourned a friend, first, but also a collaborator, one who, with Weather Report’s Jaco Pastorius, helped her jazz up 1977’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter album. Though she’d began exploring an interest in jazz with albums like Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, it wasn’t until the 1976 Pastorius collaboration Hejira that Mitchell would swap out rock players for actual jazz virtuosos, something she would come to understand as necessary to expanding her sound. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew came out more than half a decade before Hejira, but jazz fusion, the formal union of jazz and rock, was still finding its legs when former Davis side players like John McLaughlin of Mahavishnu Orchestra (the man who introduced Miles to the music of Jimi Hendrix) and Herbie Hancock began carving their own names into history. Today we hear jazz in the work of rock and alt-pop darlings like Thundercat, WILLOW, and Steve Lacy, but if there’s anything to take from the very beginnings of the overlap of styles, it’s that players recognize players and the best thing you can do is give them the freedom to stretch out.

When superstar singer and otherworldly music personality Erykah Badu was asked what attracted her to The Roots, a group whose members would become some of her most cherished collaborators, Badu’s answer was simple: jazz. The singer, whose voice has been compared to Billie Holiday and whose range has long since outshone the neo-soul billing she was first pinned to, has always considered herself a child of hip-hop—the kind that took its cues from jazz, to be specific. “It was a continuum of what A Tribe Called Quest was doing, and I was just into that sound,” she told the Red Bull Music Academy during a lecture in 2011. “It was very familiar to me, I felt like we were from the same tribe.” Badu would go on to form an actual tribe with the band called the Soulquarians, a late-’90s/early-aughts collective that boasted members of The Roots, D’Angelo, Common, Mos Def & Talib Kweli, Bilal, and Roy Hargrove. The sound they crafted on albums like Things Fall Apart, Voodoo, and her own Mama's Gun is irrefutably jazzy and heavily indebted to a groundwork laid by prolific producers a generation or two before them, people like Quincy Jones and The Mizell Brothers. Badu herself exists in a storied lineage of jazz-leaning vocalists like Anita Baker, Patrice Rushen (also a pianist!), and Al Jarreau. Some of the most beloved R&B and soul songs of all time have jazz elements to them, and you can find contemporary outfits like The Internet, Yaya Bey, and Arlo Parks using jazz to shape their respective sounds.