Acid Jazz: Overview
Like being in an elevator at the world's most laid-back club.
This was not the plan. Not that we normally have much of a plan, but if we did, it would not involve acid jazz. But do you know what acid jazz is? Because no freaking clue over here. And for some reason, the term just keeps coming up - floating around, taunting, mocking, threatening us. So we thought it was time to get to the bottom of it.
Acid jazz borrows heavily from jazz, dance, funk, disco, and hip hop, and the product is something between elevator music you can dance to and the theme song for a late-night show. It has a strong focus on the ‘groove’ of the music (like jazz), and is highly percussive. The genre has its roots in the jazz of the 1950s and 1960s, but developed into a unique genre in the UK in the 1980s, when DJs would spin obscure jazz tracks with danceable grooves in their dance music sets.
Probably the most famous (or at least commercially successful) acid-jazz track would be Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity”, which also had the quirky choreographed music video down way before OK GO were conducting their madness:
Today we are listening to the first acid jazz album to crack through into the mainstream, The Brand New Heavies’ 1991 self-titled debut. This is the flipside of the 1990s that for some of us was easy to miss - while grunge and alternative were overpowering the airwaves, jazz was carving out space for itself in the clubs.
Tasting Notes
Groove-based jazz for the clubDanceableElements of funk and hip-hop