By Seve Chambers for wsj.com
Attendees at Saturday’s Winter Jazzfest showcase at the Sullivan Room Lounge might have been slightly confused about the name of the festival they were seeing. The showcase, called Revive Da Live, did center around jazz, presenting artists like Chico Hamilton, Marcus Strickland and Kenneth Whalum. But it also brought together artists—like Vernon Reid’s Artificial Afrika, Ben Perowsky’s Moodswing Orchestra and TK Wonder—who are mostly influenced by R&B, funk, soul and, perhaps most curiously, hip-hop.
For Meghan Stabile, the founder of Revive Music Group, the self-described “boutique live-music creative agency” that planned the show, the novelty was precisely the point.
“The future of hip-hop is jazz,” she said. “That’s where they both are headed.”
Ms. Stablile, a 28-year-old Berklee College of Music graduate, launched Revive in 2006 with the intention of uniting hip-hop artists and contemporary jazz musicians in an effort to lure a wider urban audience to the origins of popular music.
“It’s about making people recognize and appreciate this great music we have,” Ms. Stabile said. “Jazz is seen like old posters of the ’50s now. Everyone thinks of it as being photos of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and such. We want to figure out if there is a way to reach out to kids and make them interested in this again.”
With a new blog (called the Revivalist) recently launched to document the emerging jazz scene, as well as a partnership with the online hip-hop Web site Okayplayer, Ms. Stabile and the eight-person Revive team are looking for new ways to make jazz seem young again. Future plans include inviting musicians to play in public-school classrooms, but for now the group’s bread and butter is pairing artists from different genres on single performance bills. Previous Revive-produced shows have featured trumpeter Nicholas Payton with rapper Talib Kweli; bassist Esperanza Spalding with rappers Jeru the Damaja and Large Professor; and trumpeter Roy Hargrove with the late emcee Guru.
Pianist Robert Glasper plays a modern strain of jazz that leaves room for hip-hop beats and rapping
Robert Glasper, a 32-year-old jazz pianist known for his work with the hip-hop-oriented Robert Glasper Experiment, sad that the greatest obstacle in luring younger listeners to jazz is the almost elitist attitude that jazz players and listeners often have about other, younger, genres.
“There are these jazz Nazis that won’t let you change anything, and will have you think that you’re not supposed to listen to anything else other than jazz,” said Mr. Glasper, who was a main attraction for Winterfest’s Revive showcase. “But, in fact, jazz fused together from a bunch of different kinds of music—that’s what jazz is. That’s why it changed so much throughout the years.”
Ms. Stabile noted that a recent evolution can be detected in the wave of live bands being hired to play behind rappers. She cited the pairing of rapper Jay-Z and hip-hop collective the Roots for the former’s MTV ‘Unplugged’ album of 2001 as a precedent-setting event. In the years since, it has become a common sight to see artists such as Eminem and Kanye West play with bands.
“The amount of rappers having bands backing them went from zero to 30 three years ago,” Ms. Stabile said. “It’s a good thing, but then you also have to wonder, where is it going?”
For its part, Revive Music Group is giving a new generation of evolving musicians a platform to speak for themselves.
“People coming to the shows are younger,” said bassist Derrick Hodge, who played with his own quartet at Sullivan Lounge and has worked with such hip-hop and R&B stars as Maxwell and Common. “We have to be perceptive of something that is relevant to them. And it is creating a movement of its own because other people can relate to it.”
