Kassa Overall

In recent years, a scene of young musicians has emerged in the USA for whom the community of like-minded people is more important than fixed genre boundaries. They don’t see jazz as an exclusionary stylistic term, but also – and precisely because of its aesthetic openness – as the epitome of “open-mindedness”. This group includes Kamasi Washington, Terrace Martin, Flying Lotus and Makaya McGraven, among others, but also the drummer, DJ and producer Kassa Overall. Overall, born in 1980 in Seattle in the north of the American West Coast, was the drummer in pianist Geri Allen’s Timelife band for many years, also worked as a sideman for trumpeter Theo Croker and often played with Christian McBride, Ravi Coltrane or Vijay Iyer. At the same time, he was also heard as a rapper, for example in the duo Kool & Kass or with Das Racist, a hip hop project from Brooklyn, where Overall now lives. These experiences benefit his own projects, in which the transitions from avant-garde to contemporary jazz and hip hop are fluid.