#AndSeeThatsTheThing, Dej Loaf, Columbia
Every year since 2010 at the BET Awards, Nicki Minaj has been named best female hip-hop artist because, well, let’s just say hip-hop has long been inhospitable to female talent in all its varieties. Simply to be heard, it can take exceptional gifts, like those possessed by Minaj. She is indisputably great, and in this particular arena, indisputably alone. During her acceptance speech this year, she acknowledged her fellow nominees, but focused on one newcomer, Dej Loaf, saying, “You’ve been very, very interesting to me, and super, super forward.”
Sixteen women have lost to Minaj in that category, but this was the first year when there was even a credible contender for runner-up. Dej Loaf, from Detroit, has a child’s voice, round and small and not yet firm. Her breakthrough single, Try Me, which was released last year, sounded like getting threatened by a particularly needling child. “I might catch a body,” she sing-rapped, and it swung like a do-si-so.
Since then, Dej Loaf has become a refreshingly chameleonic presence in hip-hop, slithering through songs about mean-mugging and songs about sweet loving. Her new EP, #AndSeeThatsTheThing — her first major-label release of new material — has some of both, her saccharine voice sometimes blurring the lines between them. (When she’s rapping alone, her sneering is most alluring: gritty songs like Desire and We Winnin’ easily outshine simple love declarations like Butterflies.)
Most of the time, her soft and stretchy voice is spread atop oozing, shimmery production, and manipulated by machines; it’s a toy to be fiddled with and molded. She meets her match here on Hey There, a hazy, undeniably sweet duet (produced by iRocksays with J Vaughn & the A-Team) with Future. He, too, uses technology to extract deeper meaning from his voice. Together, they’re like robots finally achieving sentience, androids melting into flesh and blood.
Being a female rapper invariably means all manner of collaborations with men, many unwelcome and retrograde, but Dej Loaf has consistently used those opportunities to show new sides of herself, whether adding spooky kiddie menace to Kid Ink’s Be Real or ride-or-die insouciance to the remix of Lil Durk’s What You Do to Me. But she has never been more impressive than on the remix of Omarion’s Post to Be, one of this year’s most salacious songs, and one on which Dej Loaf finally blends her aggression and her sensuality, asserting, “I’m a pimp by blood, ain’t no coaching me,” and later, cleverly shrugging, “I just got a checkup and ain’t no ho in me.”
On this EP, the duets are more balanced, be it Hey There or the rising hit Back Up, a back-and-forth with Big Sean. Both rappers are from Detroit, and the quickstepping song samples DJ Clent’s Back Up Off Me, a ghetto house and juke anthem that was the first release on the Michigan label Juke Trax. Big Sean is a whimsical, witty rapper, and while Dej Loaf can’t quite match his energy, she’s happy to double his attitude: “You got to promise not to stress me/ Don’t be blowing up my phone and don’t be leaving voice messages.”
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
Revive Music Presents: Supreme Sonacy Vol. 1, Revive Music, Revive/Blue Note
For much of the last decade, Revive Music has been a force for good, at ground level, on the jazz landscape in New York. It is an independent engine of music advocacy and concert promotion working with a core group of musicians but no fixed venue or rules of style. It has accrued a youthful audience, an online media presence and a blazing sense of purpose, though probably not in that precise order.
Revive Music Presents: Supreme Sonacy Vol. 1 is a digest of the organization’s efforts, largely put together by its tenacious founder, Meghan Stabile. It’s the sort of album that features a different crew on just about every track, with a qualification: The tracks come interspersed with remixes by hip-hop producer Raydar Ellis, who met Stabile at the Berklee College of Music and has been a Revive Music fixture from the start.
The idea of a strain of modern jazz that’s conversant with hip-hop — as a matter of course, rather than calculation — holds sway over much of this music. The trumpeter Igmar Thomas, another founding member of Revive Music, effectively sets the tone with Trane Thang, which suggests John Coltrane’s main theme from A Love Supreme sampled and reshaped by a Southern-rap classicist; it segues neatly into Pinocchio, a Wayne Shorter composition, with punchy but fluid work by keyboardist Marc Cary.
From that point on, it’s an uneven ride, though it manages not to feel like a jumble, because of Ellis’ connective interludes. Water Games — Ravel Re-Imagined, a riff on the solo piano piece Jeux d’Eau, featuring Eldar Djangirov on piano and a chamber arrangement by Slingbaum, feels hitched to a nervous metabolism. But saxophonist Marcus Strickland and singer Christie Dashiell fashion a subtle, stirring cover of Let’s Wait Awhile, the Janet Jackson hit. (It approaches the high bar for simmering R&B covers set by the Robert Glasper Experiment, and also borrows a few of its moves.)
The trumpeters Keyon Harrold and Maurice Brown team up for a soulful update to The Procrastinator, by their mutual hero Lee Morgan. And harpist Brandee Younger offers a sparkling original, Dorothy Jeanne (in tribute to Dorothy Ashby, her lodestar), that shifts from gauzy abstraction to sinuous funk, with a captivating flute solo by Anne Drummond.
Another original — Celebration of Life Suite, by pianist Ray Angry — features singer Nadia Washington alongside heavy lifters like tenor saxophonist Chris Potter and drummer Jeff (Tain) Watts, who commit fully to the task.
Where Supreme Sonacy falters is mainly in its rhetoric: You’ll want to bring a grain of salt as you peruse the album notes, or the accompanying coverage on Revive Music’s blog. There’s also a nagging tension between the mandates of a studio album and the energies of live performance, which has always been Revive Music’s strength.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
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