Straight out of Chicago, Kids These Days’ trumpet player Nico Segal debuts his solo project Illasoul: Shades of Blue. By crossbreeding lyrical spoken word poetry, a steady hip-hop beat, and the incomparable cool of Miles Davis, Segal rebirths Bitches Brew for the masses without even trying.
The eight-track album features collaborations with Vic Mensa of Kids These Days, Macie Stewart, Malcolm London, and Crucial Conflict’s Cold Hard. London’s punching spoken word and Cold Hard’s definitive hip hop from the genre’s golden age creates a project that is refreshing and very, very cool. Having neurotically dissected the album, I’ve given my greatest attempt to surmise why this combination works so well without threat of boredom or irrelevance, as many tend to find jazz music to straddle. How about this:
As any synthetic and overproduced jazz film will remind you, (i.e. Mo’ Better Blues and Lady Sings the Blues) all the greats were starving, self-destructive devotees to the craft who lived only to make better music. Thank God they did, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been so damn good. Segal takes a lesson from the masters like Monk and Mingus by staying true to his trumpet and making it better by pushing the limits of what is popular. In the same way pioneers of bebop dared to break the swing beats of Benny Goodman, Segal breaks with popular hip-hop to get with the nitty gritty of what is so pure with the jazz trumpet.
The second component of Segal’s album besides the obvious jazz allusions is his dizzying lyrics. Steering clear from twerking, shorties (are people still saying shorty?), and brief romantic connections, Nico Segal’s lyrics are satisfyingly substantial. Without being weighed down with talks of heavy political and social reform, the album speaks of the brevity of life, the profound effect of music, and the thoughts we have when we’re alone. His poetry quite literally puts words to what the greats had been playing about for the last seventy years. Segal gives himself massive shoes to fill but gracefully hits the ground running.
Review by Eva Bandurowski. Follow her on Twitter at @ewabando.
