ManyColors - Gladys [Single]

Lo-fi hip-hop is an ascendent style right now, generating hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify and coalescing around itself an global online community. Although like all hip-hop this style is composed with sampled drums and audio, instrumentalists from Paris to Japan to New York City are beginning to approach the music from their own angle and compose tracks free of sampling. Rarely, though, does one find a full band employing this approach. But travel to Denver, Colorado to the small basement studio of upstart label Color Red and you’ll find guitarist Brant Williams and his four-piece ensemble ManyColors recording sparse, low-slung hip-hop grooves direct-to-tape. Their first single “Bangs” used jazz modalities to riff over stuttering beats, and with their second song “Gladys” the group does the same but with more chemistry and confidence.

Color Red has been bringing all sorts of instrumentalists into their studio, where the board has only eight tracks and everything is recorded straight to tape. “The limitations of it are kind of neat,” says Brant - who originally hails from Des Moines, Iowa - tells me over the phone. Brant comes from a jazz background and plays frequently with jam and funk groups including Workshy and Judo Chop. “I’ve always played that sort of way, in the funk jam style. Being a guitar player, that can lend itself to extended solos and that sort of stuff. It’s fun to play that way, but eventually I ran into J Dilla’s music. I just loved the crossroads between jazz and hip-hop, and just the idea of chillin’ out. That was super attractive coming from this background of extended solos and extended forms.”

Brant is not a hiphop head by any stretch, although he does not dig for instrumentals after catching the scent of groove from Dilla. ManyColors is a great example of how intersectional lo-fi hip hop has become. That drag, that quintessential bodyrock shuffle, truly transcends genre and culture. Guided by Color Red - a real musician’s label run by Eddie Roberts of The New Mastersounds - Brant linked up with his bandmates. He gives them bare-bones charts and they - Braxton Khan, Eric Luba and Kirwan Brown - let it fly in the studio in true jazz fashion. Working in tandem with the keyboard player Eric Luba the group crafts rich, comforting harmonies on “Gladys” that float on top of Khan’s popping percussion. “The tempos are all up,” In the funk and jam band, says Brant, but now he’s, “vibing in the lower tempos, and that’s super refreshing.”

Brant’s not the only musician to approach instrumental hip-hop through the back door of jazz, and he certainly won’t be the last. Indeed, he says once he began playing in this new style he realized many people around him were doing the same, he just “wasn’t hip to it”. But with the group’s emphasis on harmony, the slightest touch of Americana in their melodies, and the relative absence of hip-hop in Brant’s musical background, ManyColors has a take on lo-fi hardly replicated anywhere else. Look out for more music from this group in 2019, and if you’re in Denver tonight check out their J Dilla tribute set at Cervantes’ Other Side as part of Live for Live Music’s ‘The Funk Sessions”.

FOLLOW ManyColors: Official

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Aaron Johnston's J.E.D.I. - Momento [Single]

Aaron Johnston stands at the helm of an ambitious live project that brings together virtuoso musicians across a broad span of genres; Aaron Johnston’s J.E.D.I. An acronym for “Jazz-Electronic-Dance-Improvised", J.E.D.I. is exactly what it suggests; a high-octane, hybrid-jazz fusion with a dance floor mentality and jazz fluidity. The group’s roster is improvised, too, in that it rotates and has included members of the String Cheese Incident and Thievery Corporation, among others. Recently, Aaron tapped the talents of Borahm Lee (Break Science, Pretty Lights Live), Dominic Lali (Big Gigantic), and Josh Fairman (SunSquabi) to take J.E.D.I. out of the live sphere and into the studio. The group is working with the upstart Color Red imprint out of Denver, a progressive new label focusing on jazz, soul, and the gooey bits in-between, to record and produce original J.E.D.I. compositions to be released on a monthly basis.

The third of these monthly tracks is “Momento”, a vibratory, seat-of-the-pants excursion into instrumental harmony. Bringing the sum of the band’s influences and styles under a single release, “Momento” sets the tone with a vivacious keyboard melody, slowly introducing the washed-out synthesis and low end. Not but a few measures in, the percussion punctures the stereo space with a drum and bass saunter that flips the atmosphere from pensive to industrial. All along the way, the saxophone takes the lead with a meandering legato, dancing above the instrumental interplay like the canopy of a forest. Bringing the energy to a ballistic climax, the percussion launches into a mad build-up, buoying the rising textures of interpolated synthesis around it. As the tension breaks, a simpatico of improvisation and instrumental dialogue sets off through the jazz multiverse. As the song reaches a break-neck conclusion, all instrumental elements are left adrift, slowly fading out through a haze of smokey tones and asymmetrical audio glitches.

J.E.D.I. found a home on Color Red through a chance meeting at Jazz Fest in New Orleans. According to Aaron:

“Eddie [Eddie Roberts, guitarist of The New Mastersounds and Color Red founder] and I had the chance to play together for the first time last year when J.E.D.I. played at Jazz Fest. I had played the fest earlier that evening with David Byrne so I was able to slip that one gig in between tour dates with David. So happy I did!  Everyone just had a blast. I think it was refreshing for Eddie to be placed in a different element.  We hit it off instantly and from there we continued working together when our schedules allowed, and then he basically brought up Color Red to me and the timing was right for me to start to get some music recorded and out there.”

The timing feels ripe indeed. The burgeoning sounds of modern jazz are in constant flux, and rightly so. It is an inherently amorphous genre that flows in and out of musical modality. Aaron Johnston is a quintessential audio astronaut and explorer, combining the cutting edge with an ability and desire to look back on our sonic origins. As a result, J.E.D.I. is a project with few comparisons. With Color Red connecting the group to extremely talented audio engineers (the label always prioritizes top tier mixing and mastering talent), and with Eddie producing and co-signing the vision, it’s no wonder this quartet feels like it’s been a decade in the making.

FOLLOW Aaron Johnston’s J.E.D.I: Color Red / Bandcamp / Facebook / Soundcloud

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ManyColors - Bangs [Single]

ManyColors is a new four-piece band that opens up new musical space by using a hip-hop format to explore chords and motifs usually reserved for jazz on their debut single “Bangs”. Soft and sure, “Bangs” offers comfort to the listener but presents a series of unanswered questions. Sonically it combines the twinkle of contemporary lo-fi aesthetics with the electric groove of older, more established styles. This is a new sort of notch in the catalog of Color Red, a Denver-based label run by Eddie Roberts, the guitarist from British jazz fusion quartet The New Mastersounds.

Braxton Kahn dials in drums that stride with a subtle and seemingly off-time step. According to Color Red, guitarist Brant Williams “aims to capture all the musicians as if they were sampled while cultivating a fresh harmonic approach.” It’s impressive that a four-piece band of trained jazz musicians can be recorded to sound like a lo-fi hip-hop beat. It’s more intriguing that they would want to. Eric Luba tickles a Fender Rhodes electric organ, gently laying down those warm melodies that are so frequently sampled in lo-fi beats. Kirwan Brown works the bass guitar well, especially during the song’s swinging second movement.

The direct-to-tape approach of the producers Mike Tallman and Josh Fairman is another gesture towards hip-hop and creates a layer of dusty reverb across the stereo spread. Despite this dust, the audio quality is top-tier, and this is refreshing. (Not to discredit anyone, but much lo-fi music mistakes poor audio quality for an aesthetic). Apparently Color Red has “several” more songs from ManyColors scheduled for 2019. If you dig the audio quality, intelligent harmonics and of course the smooth vibe, then stay chooned.

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