Americanmusic 29 3 0277

Hip Hop Samples Jazz: Dynamics of Cultural Memo y and Musical Tradition in the African
American 1990s
Author(s): Tom Perchard
Source: American Music , Vol. 29, No. 3 (Fall 2011), pp. 277-307
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/americanmusic.29.3.0277
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Tom Perchard
Hip Hop Samples Jazz:

Dynamics of Cultural Memory
and Musical Tradition
in the African American 1990s
The critical attempt to historicize hip hop dates at least to David Toop’s
1984 Rap Attack: African Griots to New York Jive, a book written with jour-
nalistic immediacy and yet, as its subtitle suggests, one that situates rap
reportage in the black musical longue durée. But it wasn’t until the mid-
1990s that efforts toward an academic hip hop scholarship began in ear-
nest, and it was then that ideas about the music’s methods and meanings
as rooted in the black musical past became common currency. This view
wasn’t surprising: a neat and untroubled line could be traced from the
classic African American toasts to rap, and the use of digital sampling,
whereby hip hop producers constructed their work from (black) music’s
recorded back catalogue, was equally suggestive for historically minded
observers. This sampling practice, and its “historical” interpretation,
form the central subject of this article.
Certainly hip hop’s early scholars differed in their reasoning as to what
the form’s use of old records meant for black music and history. Some
positioned the practice as part of a linear, cultural-national tradition some-
times shaded with essentialism. William Eric Perkins claimed, with total-
izing confidence, that “sampling was and is hip hop’s ongoing link with
history and tradition, including all of the African and African American
musical genres.” A more modulated Kyra D. Gaunt contended that hip
hop’s sampling was “the perfect medium for expressing the temporal
culture-scape of who we are, and how we became, across time.” Joining
these arguments, though, were more constructivist theorizations, these
Tom Perchard holds the post of Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, Univer-
sity of London. His research is focused on African American music in general
and jazz in particular. His first book, Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture, was
published in 2006 by Equinox, and he is now working on a study of jazz in France.
American Music Fall 2011
© 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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278 Perchard
made by writers for whom rap’s membership of a musical tradition was

something bartered as much as birthright. In his book Spectacular Vernacu-
lars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism, Russell A. Potter wrote that
“hip-hop’s continual citation of the sonic and verbal archives of rhythm
and blues, jazz, and funk forms and re-forms the traditions it draws upon.”
Potter’s work also embraced a third common scholarly perspective, one
in which (as Potter put it) sampling producers’ search for sounds would
become “a kind of genealogical research” into the black musical past. In
her landmark Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America, Tricia Rose had similarly positioned rap’s sampling practice as
cross-generational “homage,” “a means of archival research, a process of
musical and cultural archaeology.” Whether cultural-nationalist, construc-
tivist, or genealogical, much early scholarly writing on hip hop sampling
sought to position the practice as one in which the musicians’ relation to
a black musical past was of primary importance.1
A music so often and so determinedly formed of historical sonic ar-
tifacts surely deserved such a framing. And yet there might have been
something suspicious about the scholarly attempt to stage musicians as
researchers, genealogists, historians—that is, to portray musicians as
people no less interested in tradition, memorial, and the past than the
scholars themselves. In his ethnographic study of the aesthetics of hip
hop production, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop (2004),
Joseph Schloss criticizes this tendency, emphasizing producers’ creative
and pragmatic strategies over any mooted cultural-historical concerns.
While such anachronic collages would seem to hold a great deal of
interpretive promise for semioticians, producers are not particularly
concerned with using samples to make social, political, or historical
points. In fact, symbolic meaning (as opposed to pragmatic value
within the musical system) is almost universally overstated by schol-
ars as a motive for sampling.2
The author’s argument is supported by the comments of numerous
producer-interviewees. Schloss reads Prince Paul a critical interpretation
of some of the producer’s late-1980s work with De La Soul, the author
of which was concerned with highlighting the irony supposedly inher-
ent in a black musical sampling of blue-eyed soul relics Hall and Oates.
Prince Paul responds: “Wow. That’s pretty deep. But I think the bottom
line is just: it was a good song! . . . We didn’t consciously think of ‘Hall
and Oates,’ ‘Resurrecting,’ you know, ‘Postmodern.’ We was just like,
‘Wow. Remember that song? That’s hot!’”3 Schloss’s interviewee-experts
are consistent in their offerings, and the author’s own interpretation is
compelling. But this cultural-historical attitude was not only to be found
in the wishful thoughts of hip hop’s academic commentators; a reading
of interviews given by hip hop producers even before these first scholarly
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Hip Hop Samples Jazz 279
appraisals were written suggests that Schloss’s argument is not quite as

secure as it might seem (even if those early appraisals didn’t make use
of such interview evidence). What to make of Pete Rock’s comments,
made to Hip-Hop Connection in 1992, and of an idea of music making in
which the historical is more important than the “original”?
The only thing that is original in our music is the lyrics. What we
do is rejuvenate the old records. To me, our music is not up-to-
date. That’s something I want everybody to know. Our music is
not up-to-date rap. Artists today such as Heavy D and Hammer
and Vanilla Ice, those are probably up-to-date rappers who make
up-to-date music, whereas our music is like old ’70s music. We just
take old records, reincarnate them and make them Pete Rock and
CL Smooth records.4
Schloss identifies among hip hop producers a shared interest not in “the
history of a community . . . but the history of sound recordings,” and Pete
Rock may have to an extent concurred.5 But that producer’s “reincarna-
tion” of old records—made in distinction to a commercially conceived
“up-to-date” rap—worked together with his rapper partner CL Smooth’s
themes of reminiscence to produce work that seemed determined to face
a shared social past as much as a musical present. These two artists were
far from alone in taking a purposeful attitude toward questions of the
historical in their work.
But this is not in itself enough to justify what, Schloss’s critique not-
withstanding, remains the persistent and unexamined notion of hip hop
sampling as an atavistic custom. Though increased copyright vigilance
and receding novelty had, by the end of the 1990s, led to a decline in
sampling as both creative method and subject of critical discussion, the
twenty-first-century scholarly literature nevertheless suggests that early
speculations about the practice’s historical meaning have hardened into
either trope or cliché.6 Sampling is commonly and casually said to either
function as a medium of significant, binding collective memory or else
enact some kind of musico-cultural traditionary incorporation.7 These two
figures, cultural memory and tradition, are difficult to separate from one
another, and while they are intertwined with every aspect of the debate
on sampling’s historicity, they are almost never defined in this context and
their precise workings are left unexamined. In what follows, I will attempt
to theorize both terms according to scholarly convention, before testing
those definitions against producers’ own contemporary commentary.
Cultural Memory
It would be understandable if, in attempting to make hip hop the sub-
ject of academic research, those early scholars had swathed the music
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280 Perchard
in regalia acceptable on campus, and hip hop’s arrival as an object of

study must be seen in the light of wider trends in the humanities at the
time—the movement of academic investigation into cultural traditions
previously beyond WASPish concern, and the sudden growth in studies
of cultural memory.
Here, with memory studies, was a new method of bypassing the of-
ficial and reading culture and society from below. In his 1997 Varieties of
Cultural History, Peter Burke crystallized a common observation: “His-
tory” always being written by the victors, marginalized cultural groups
have been apt to make more of that cultural memory that either doesn’t
qualify for or else evades normal archiving and institutionalization; the
circulation and reproduction of memories, often through performative
rather than literary acts, constructs oppositional historical narratives at
the same time as it defines a contemporary “us” and “them.”8 It is hardly
surprising that writers addressing the African American past—one only
sketchily present in many forms of “official” or curricular American
history—should have been drawn to memory study as it blossomed in
the 1990s.
No single work was more widely influential in the memory boom than
a piece by the French historian Pierre Nora, translated into English in 1989
as “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire.”9 For Nora,
history—what we can ironically call the objective record—“belongs to
everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority,” while
memory “is blind to all but the group it binds.” And while history clings
to the events that plot its trajectory toward the present, memory “attaches
itself to sites,” places, and practices—lieux—that act as objects of reflection
for those concerned rememberers who make a most “deliberate” stand
against cultural forgetting, and the past’s neutralization into objective
history.10 Nora’s piece acted as both common referent and final word in
Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally’s 1994 edited volume History and
Memory in African-American Culture, and, even if most of the contributors
to that important book were concerned with black literature, following
this entry to the field of African American studies, Nora has often since
been invoked alongside the idea of black musical practice as a “site” of
cultural memory and memorial.11
Other major works of the mid-1990s made musical explorations of
similar terrain: both Paul Gilroy’s 1993 The Black Atlantic and Samuel A.
Floyd’s 1995 The Power of Black Music envisioned musical practices as
spaces in which ritualized, socialized memories—of Africa, of slavery
and its aftermath—were constructed and performed.12 But if these writ-
ers were turning to ideas of memory at the same time as many of those
working in other areas, then this was as much a revisiting of a landmark
topos in the study of African American music as it was the establishment
of a new lieu de mémoire. From W. F. Allen’s introductory comments in
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his collected Slave Songs of the United States (1867) through W.E.B. Du
Bois’ famous interpolation of “sorrow songs” into his 1903 masterpiece
The Souls of Black Folk, the idea of African American music’s functioning
as a vessel for the memory of the storied and troubled black American
experience has been returned to again and again.13 If Schloss is right,
and critical investment in a historically minded sampling practice has
always outweighed that of the music’s producers themselves, then the
overstatement is likely owed to the long standing of a critical idea of
African American music which, more than just a formalist tradition of
practice, would also function as a storehouse for cultural memory, form-
ing and signifying in pitch, rhythm, and gesture a historic experience
stretching from Dahomey to the South Bronx.
It’s not immediately apparent how we might get past the metaphori-
cal level at which these arguments often seem to operate and gain a
precise understanding of the mechanisms by which such long cultural
memories can meaningfully be shared from one generation to the next.
Without examining the ways that what were supposedly lived experi-
ences of old music were passed down to and (re)circulated by those who
had grown up in its absence, the figure might begin to look like that
antique, pseudo-genetic “racial memory” from which collective uncon-
scious supposedly springs a panhistorical ethnic self-comprehension. I
will attempt the beginnings of such an examination below, but it may
be that the concept of tradition will offer another, simpler explanation
of the actual workings of cultural continuity such as we are concerned
with here.
Tradition
“Tradition” is itself a nebulous term, variously signaling an observed or
imagined causal chain of thoughts or acts, a value system (or ideology)
derived from such observed or imagined continuity, or, as is often the
case in music, the (regular) reflective return to some form of repeatable
content.14 Those first two conceptions, often essentialist or primordialist,
suggesting cultural continuation that in its proper state is unconscious
or passive, have been far from uncommon in African American theori-
zations of tradition.15 But ideas of tradition as something consciously
and critically constructed—in the present, but from the materials of the
past—loom just as large; the African American cultural experience has,
after all, been substantially marked and shaped by loss and reparative
bricolage. In his 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” collected by
Alain Locke in the milestone Harlem Renaissance volume The New Negro
(1925), the archivist and historian Arthur A. Schomburg wrote that “the
American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. . . .
For him, group tradition must supply compensation for persecution,
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282 Perchard
and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what
slavery took away.”16
This idea has been articulated in countless contexts since. But I want
to make a definition of tradition that would shed light on the meanings
of sampling’s creative “reading” of materials drawn from the recorded
African American past; this might be seen as a hermeneutic operation,
and so, entering into the spirit (so as to permit a fuller critique) of Tricia
Rose’s history writing-rap, I will here briefly consider the ways that her-
meneutic methods have been put in the service of that project of historical
restitution and reactivation.
Undoubtedly the key work in post-Romantic hermeneutics is Hans-
Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960).17 Gadamer emphasizes the
contemporaneity of any historical operation: the meanings of the past can
only be apprehended by engaging in dialogue with the past’s texts—we
can imagine a definition of “text” that would encompass sound record-
ings—a dialogue in which the motives and values of both present reader
and historical writer are, rather than suppressed, foregrounded.18 This
foregrounding engenders true historical consciousness, which, eschew-
ing an Olympian re-presentation of the past simply understood, mani-
fests instead a recognition and accommodation of the full difference of
historical being, and enables the transformation of the present self in
light of that recognition.
Such ideas have been influential for several African American thinkers
attempting to set out a hermeneutics that, encountering a fragmentary
and alien African American past in which the suppression of identity is
an ever-present concern, engages it in the name of identity’s tradition-
ary comprehension and contemporary advancement.19 While making
explicit use of Gadamer’s work, Tsenay Serequeberhan also cites the
Congolese philosopher Okonda w’eleko Okolo’s affirmation of herme-
neutics as “offer[ing] praxis a cultural self-identity, necessary for ideo-
logical combat.” Serequeberhan argues that in cultivating this encounter
with the past, African Americans at once cultivate “the heritage of the
struggle” and enact that struggle’s continuation.20 So to naïve ideas of
tradition as essential, authentic cultural custom—the “naïve” need not
be pejorative—we can add this hermeneutic traditionality, a form of
history writing that constructs a tradition by entering into a reflective,
critical, and creative reading of the “texts” of the past, and in so doing
helps a contemporary cultural project cohere.
Both “naïve” and “critical” concepts of tradition will be encountered
below. Yet I have already shown that this kind of argument, made in
the context of sampling in a rather less theorized fashion, has attracted
Joseph Schloss’s disdain for pitting the political over the pragmatic.21
Certainly it will be important to keep the risk of overinterpretation in
mind. But so will it be necessary to avoid intentional fallacy, and though
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I will take seriously the musicians’ discussion of their work, there is no

reason to think the issue of sampling’s historicity could be settled by the
simple presentation of what Schloss calls the producers’ stated “motives”
(or to imagine that these statements are unproblematic articulations of
pre-existing ideas rather than utterances appearing in the midst of spe-
cific media framings). The practice’s historical meanings will prove to be
multiply constructed, not necessarily guided, and certainly not limited,
by individual intention.
Though I have begun by thinking about the historical significance of
hip hop sampling in general, I’ll develop this investigation by consider-
ing one aspect of the practice in particular, that is, the early 1990s turn
to jazz as a sample source. This moment is one particularly rich in both
traditionary-theoretical quandaries on the one hand, and useful source
materials on the other. Coming at a time when the methods and aesthet-
ics of hip hop sampling were well established, and signifying the new
appropriation of a musical repertoire with a strong and widely appreci-
ated sense of boundedness in terms of stylistic identity and history, the
phenomenon was especially marked, and often the subject of discussion
among journalists and musicians.
Hip Hop Samples Jazz

During the mid-1980s, thanks to newly affordable studio equipment by
Ensoniq and Akai, digital sampling arrived proper in hip hop. The fol-
lowing years saw James Brown’s recorded archive achieve pre-eminence
as a sample source; though the methods and styles of leading producers
like Marley Marl, Paul C, and the Bomb Squad varied dramatically, and
though these artists were nothing if not eclectic in their use of sample
material, it was the funk of twenty years earlier that most helped define
hip hop’s soundworld at the end of the decade.
It was against this grain that producers began to structure their work
around snippets of what was identified, or identifiable, as “jazz.” In 1988
Stetsasonic released their much-cited “Talkin’ All That Jazz,” in vari-
ous mixes sampling or reperforming Lonnie Liston Smith and Donald
Byrd. In 1989 Gang Starr’s first album, No More Mr Nice Guy, featured
the song “Jazz Music,” in which Guru rapped a narrative history of the
style over a patchwork of Ramsey Lewis and Charlie Parker; the group
repeated the formula the following year for “Jazz Thing,” their (now
much better-known) contribution to the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s film
Mo’ Better Blues. Much of the music using jazz, however, was made by the
various groups connected by collaboration, ethic, and dress style under
the name Native Tongues—Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, De
La Soul, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep—and it was A Tribe Called Quest
who were most often associated with rap’s embrace of jazz sources, by
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284 Perchard
press and listeners alike. The group’s first album, People’s Instinctive
Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990), featured samples from records by
Jimmy Smith, Grover Washington Jr., Cannonball Adderley, Roy Ayers,
and a number of other jazz artists. The Low End Theory (1991) made use
of Grant Green, Gary Bartz, Art Blakey, Les McCann, Freddie Hubbard,
and studio contributions—a rarity at this time—from bassist Ron Carter.
That album’s “Jazz (We’ve Got)” illustrated the archetypal differences
in sound between the new jazz tendency and late-1980s leaders like
Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy: in contrast to the thud-
ding urgency of those groups, here rappers Q-Tip and Phife Dawg flow
at conversational volume over a swathe of plush electric piano ninth
chords, deep wooden bass tones, and whirling brushes.
These artists were central to what, despite resistance from the musi-
cians themselves, soon became defined by critics as the subgenre “jazz
rap” or “hip hop jazz.”22 By 1992, A Tribe Called Quest’s producer Ali
Shaheed Muhammad was worrying that what had started as a creative
strategy was hardening into a style. “I think it is beginning to be widely
accepted, and that might be a problem,” he told Billboard. “Now every rap
record coming out has some type of jazz groove to it, and I fear this is the
next phase that’s gonna phase itself out.”23 Indeed, without positioning
jazz centrally in their work or identifying as “jazz rap” groups as such, a
number of then-emergent young artists (UMCs, Das EFX, FU-Shnickens,
KMD, Leaders of the New School, Nas) would scatter jazz samples across
their tracks; several rap groups who rose to chart success without hav-
ing first cultivated a core hip hop following (Dream Warriors, Digable
Planets) had also made much of jazz’s sound and semiotics. What had
been an untapped sample resource in 1989 had by 1993 become com-
monplace. And as the incorporation of jazz’s materials developed, so
both the sonic prominence and semiotic specificity of those materials
were often pulled further down in the mix; a usage as foregrounded as
Gang Starr’s deployment of the “A Night in Tunisia” riff ceded to any
number of isolated, anonymous Hammond stabs or upright bass licks.
Subsequent critical attempts to relate hip hop and jazz have often fol-
lowed that pattern outlined above. The titles of works such as James L.
Conyers’s edited volume African American Jazz and Rap: Social and Philo-
sophical Examinations of Black Expressive Behavior (2001), and Earl Stewart
and Jane Duran’s 1999 article “Black Essentialism: The Art of Jazz Rap,”
do as much work as the impressionistic arguments contained therein.24
Equally indicative of this critical evaluation is Joseph Patel’s assertion
that A Tribe Called Quest’s second album established “a consummate
link between generations, taking the essence of jazz and the essence of
hip hop and showing they originated from the same black center.”25
Essentialist theories only come into being when the presence of dif-
ference is felt. In order for A Tribe Called Quest to demonstrate essential
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similarities between hip hop and jazz, such similarities formerly had to
have been masked; for hip hop to recover jazz as a sound source, jazz
formerly had to in some way have been left behind. So to what extent
did such a marked discontinuity exist between the two forms? In 1990
KRS-One remarked: “My audience, a rap audience, would not have the
faintest idea what jazz is supposed to be, where it came from or anything
because it’s history. Jazz to rappers was looked on as the music of junk-
ies and drug addicts, or else some middle class white person trying to
be hip.”26 Likewise, in 1994 Gang Starr’s Guru told The Source magazine
that an unidentified “they” had “t[aken] jazz and made it just for an elite
crowd. They took it away from blacks.”27
Indeed, standard histories of jazz have tended to describe the music’s
progress in two stages: the first, a period of developing common prac-
tice, driven by African American musicians and audiences, and lasting
until the 1960s; the second a “delta of many streams” or some variation,
a global and stylistic spread during which jazz became much less spe-
cifically identified with the African American experience.28 These are, to
be sure, simplistic analyses, and they ignore heterogeneity of all kinds
identifiable at any moment in the music’s history. Yet it is possible to
track jazz’s growing, post-1960s alienation from those African Americans
generally understood to have once formed its “original” core demo-
graphic. Diminishing commercial opportunities were routinely decried
by black jazz musicians in the late-1960s jazz press, and the activities of
early 1970s jazz collectives like the Collected Black Artists and the Jazz
and People’s Movement aimed, via concert promotion and protest, to
confront this issue and, in the words of the CBA’s manifesto, to “take
whatever steps necessary to improve conditions and communications
to secure the destiny of our art form.”29
In his studies of hard bop and its African American practitioners and
audiences, David Rosenthal argues that working opportunities for jazz
musicians, not to mention the music’s means of education and incul-
cation, had disappeared from black neighborhoods as what had been
economically and culturally cohesive communities fragmented in the
years following desegregation; musician testimonies I have gathered
elsewhere have concurred.30 Local jazz networks were no less troubled
than those of the national media. At that time, the critic and producer Ira
Gitler recalled, “Young black musicians were going into soul music, they
weren’t coming into jazz. You could make money with soul music. And
besides, they didn’t have the role models that young black musicians
had had before. I called it cultural genocide—jazz disappeared off black
radio stations.”31 If US radio saw outlets for jazz broadcast in the 1970s in
steep decline, so independent labels like Blue Note, Savoy, Atlantic and
Prestige, which had invested in and documented the jazz of previous
decades—and which had been strongly identified with the often-young
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black musicians who dominated their rosters—were either bust, near-

dormant, or avoiding recording jazz out of commercial common sense.
Jazz’s black cultural marginalization was bemoaned, but also inadver-
tently reinforced, by those artists who delivered eulogies to the apparently
departed style. In words and music the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Amiri
Baraka, Larry Neal, and many others recorded remembrances of jazz’s his-
torical lineage and homages to its greats—the “Coltrane poem” became a
form of its own after the saxophonist’s death—and in memorializing the
music’s past these works drew attention to that tradition’s closure.32
It’s easy to see why hip hop producers in their early twenties and even
late teens at the turn of the 1990s, those born at the moment of jazz’s ap-
parent demise, were construed as acting with acute historical conscious-
ness: not because of their closeness to jazz source materials, but precisely
because of their distance from them.33 In contrast to that conception of
tradition that represents (or pretends to represent) an often-unconscious
continuity, this was the purposeful bridging of discontinuity, a rupture in
time, historical knowledge, and musical method. The didactic narrative
Gang Starr’s Guru delivers in “Jazz Thing” (1990) reaches over suppos-
edly jazzless decades to recover names lost for a generation (“In the ’40s
came bebop, the first bebop / The real bebop, so let me talk about / Diz
and Bird, giving the word . . . ”).34
The music then becoming understood as a fixture of objective Ameri-
can history (written, presumably, by the same “they” who had removed
jazz from the black lifeworld), Guru’s narrative might be seen as reclaim-
ing jazz on behalf of a particular cultural memory, situating a tale of
jazz past in a strikingly black hip hop present so as to cement the idea
of music as an oppositional African American lieu de mémoire. But if the
old was here being remembered in the musical context and terms of the
new, then historical finitude was still given as jazz’s defining feature.
Guru’s developmental narrative ends with John Coltrane and Ornette
Coleman, breakthrough figures of the late 1950s and early 1960s; closing
his last verse by arguing that jazz was not dead in 1990, Guru cites as
then-current figures—nameless “young cats” aside—only Betty Carter,
Sonny Rollins, and Max Roach, all bebop veterans, the youngest of them
born sixty years previously. The song describes a complete and historical
canon, admirable but remote.35
This historical and sociological distance aside, scattered utterances
made by rappers before those early 1990s sampling reclamations began
seem to confirm that, for hip hop in the 1980s, “jazz” had also been con-
sidered beyond the pale as a specifically musical proposition. “Even if it’s
jazz or the quiet storm, I hook a beat up, convert it into hip hop form,”
raps Rakim in “I Ain’t No Joke” (1987): notwithstanding Rakim’s self-
professed production skills, as a likely sample source jazz was on a par
with the “quiet storm” radio format whose low-lit smoothness was still
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antithetical to the hip hop attitude.36 In a February 1987 WBAU radio

interview, KRS-One, enjoying a fit of expansive ambition, claims that his
group Boogie Down Productions “has to be absolutely, positively differ-
ent from every single crew out here. . . . We started with hip hop, then
we went into reggae. I’d like to say,” he concludes, “that we’re going
into jazz, and we’re also going into Mexican music,” mariachi apparently
lying only one degree further than jazzman from the hip hop quotidian.37
Five years later—even after “jazz” had been recognized as a viable
sample source—Public Enemy’s Chuck D, responding to a question
about precedents for rap’s black poetry set to music, described the gulf
that existed between hip hop and an earlier generation’s jazz (implicitly
validating the common idea that jazz lost its black audience when it left
its dance music origins behind):
The thing about the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron is that they were
into a jazz-type approach, doing poetry over a beat. When rap music
came along, it was poetry over a beat too, but in time. More important
than the Last Poets or Gil Scott-Heron, to us, was James Brown. His
record, “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” had the most impact
because it was danceable and yet you still thought about it. What
really influenced me and other rappers was guys like Kool Herc,
Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Eddie Cheeba, and DJ Hol-
lywood, because they kept the rhythm happening, you know what
I’m saying? They rocked the groove, and the groove was funk and
soul, which was different from jazz.38
These were perhaps the three most important rappers of the late 1980s:
to KRS-One and Rakim, jazz was part of a set of unlikely musical genres
accessible only because of their own unusually imaginative production
or diversification strategies, while to Chuck D jazz—specifically, he sug-
gests, jazz’s rhythmic characteristics—was no longer communicative to
“us,” a black audience.
It wasn’t just jazz that was distant: from an advanced historical van-
tage point it is not easy to recognize how far hip hop was considered to
lie from “music” tout court, by its practitioners and fans as much as its
detractors. Together with its banishment of live instruments in favor of
appropriated snatches of old recorded music, the radicality of the style’s
antimelodic vocals—its limitations on melodic and harmonic content in
general—repulsed and attracted equally, enacting a break from musi-
cal tradition of any kind that some producers, most famously the Bomb
Squad’s Hank Shocklee, located as the site of a full-blown method. “In
dealing with rap, you have to be innocent and ignorant of music,” Shock-
lee said in 1990. “A musician will go, ‘No, those are the wrong keys. The
tones are clashing.’ We don’t look at it that way.”39
But the increasing popularity around this time of jazz as a sample
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source led to much theorizing—on the part of journalists and, more-

over, the producers responsible—as to the supposed similarities between
jazz and hip hop’s methods; if sonic citation acted as a memorial to the
past, then this theoretical tendency, spawned of that understanding of
tradition as natural cultural continuation, aimed to identify elements
in an ongoing practical custom. A number of critics noted that hip hop
sampling was, as Mark Sinker wrote in 1992, a technique “in the grand
syncretic tradition of bebop, not ashamed to acknowledge that techno-
logical means and initial building material are always simply what falls
to hand . . . meaning is . . . a matter of energetic and visionary redeploy-
ment, not who first owned or made this or that fragment.”40
Indeed, this bricolage tradition stretched back through the blues to—
at the very least—the long, communal creation of the spirituals in the
early nineteenth century. Such communality was the concern of A Tribe
Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad, who, drawing an equivalence
between the live rap show and the jam, the studio posse cut and the
blowing session, told Billboard in 1992 that
[a] lot of the [older] jazz musicians lived the same life as rappers.
It’s underground music. And you had collaboration—a bunch of
different kinds of instrumentalists coming together to record an
album—which is kind of like what rap music was about a long time
ago, just a whole bunch of rappers from all over just coming in and
doing their thing.41
This kind of idea had already been posited by Quincy Jones, who, having
begun his career in Lionel Hampton’s band, could comfortably claim to
speak for those on the other side of the historical bargain. In addition to
affinities of creative method, Jones identified the musics’ shared outsider
status. “Rap is the same thing that Miles Davis and Dizzy [Gillespie]
said,” Jones told Straight No Chaser in 1990. “It’s rebellious music. It was
not readily accepted by the public, Black radio still won’t play it hardly,
so they’ve developed their own underground. They play for each other
like the be-boppers did.”42
And yet few if any rappers were ready to proclaim an unproblematic
fealty to either the idea of hip hop and jazz’s traditionary unity, or to the
cultural memory of jazz and the musicians of the past: identification was
almost always tempered by a certain ambivalence. Previously cited rap
perceptions of jazz as a music associated with the white middle class,
perceptions not entirely inaccurate, meant that artists like Gang Starr,
keen to maintain a street image and audience, were apt to handle their
discussions of jazz with care.43 Talking in 1994 to a reporter from hip
hop’s journal of record, The Source—and thus communicating to a “core”
rap audience with certain assumed social experiences and biases—Guru
was charmlessly clear as to where, between hip hop and his jazz side
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project, his real allegiance lay: “Gang Starr is my girlfriend,” he said,

“Jazzmatazz is my ho.”44
These loyalties were aesthetic as well as social. Gang Starr’s DJ Pre-
mier told both Billboard and The Source that he had begun using jazz
sample material out of “boredom” with ubiquitous James Brown breaks
rather than any attachment to the music.45 On another occasion Guru
told Straight No Chaser that the group’s “Jazz Thing” was “a tribute to
the music and how it’s still lasting in today’s world.” But Premier, also
present at the interview, was keen to make clear that he wanted “to keep
the roots, that was turntables, a raw beat, a little musical flavour and the
voice.”46 To Premier at least, “music”—here, jazz—was considered an
appendage, all but antithetical to “roots;” the sampling of jazz did not
represent hip hop’s subsumption into a grand African American tradi-
tion, instead a departure from the tradition, the roots, of hip hop.
Hip hop’s continuing nonplussedness toward the idea of the conven-
tionally “musical,” and to musical convention, sometimes led to a hyper-
bolizing of those identified aesthetic commonalities between jazz’s past
and rap’s present and a critique of contemporary jazz practice. Daddy-O
of Stetsasonic argued that
[t]he way jazz musicians created then is how hip-hoppers create
now. They would go with a feeling and take pieces from here and
there. And so do we. . . . Jazz is not what Wynton Marsalis does—
play some 40-year-old chords or some 30-year-old runs that Charlie
Parker played. Jazz is what emanates from what the people are
doing in their particular day and time. I believe that hip-hop is the
jazz music of today.47
Hank Shocklee, too, had claimed to be “pissed off about a lot of jazz
musicians”:
The new guys who are coming up only mimic what they’ve heard
in the past. And jazz was never like that. It was always an explora-
tion music. It explored new levels, new sounds, new things. There
was never a formula for jazz. I mean, Theloni[o]us Monk didn’t
care about keys, notes, tones, anything. He wanted his music to be
spontaneous and as alive as possible. That’s why I’m waiting for
the day when there comes a new set of musicians who don’t give a
fuck about none of that stuff.48
It didn’t quite hold, of course; as much as Monk had to “care” deeply
about tonal convention in order to depart from it, Shocklee’s antimusical
work achieved its power in its being organized by a deeply “musical”
sensibility.49 But this argument claimed a cultural memory of jazz—un-
derstood as an especially innovative practice, undertaken from below or
outside the conventional—in order to strip that music of this historically
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established status and reassign it to present hip hop. If the concepts of

cultural memory and tradition discussed at the outset emphasize the
dialogical nature of relationships constructed between then and now in
the name of politico-cultural unity, then perhaps they do not fully ac-
count for common inclinations certainly on show here: the tendency to
Whiggishly mobilize past triumphs for the glorification of the present,
and the extent to which such putative cultural “unity” can be tested
by competing contemporary uses of the past—made in this case by the
rappers and jazz’s then-new classicizing movement, the “new guys”
epitomized by Wynton Marsalis (of whom more below).
The memory of “past” musics in the African American present was
complicated in other ways. It had been common for early hip hop DJs
to soak records in the bath so as to remove their labels before playing
them in public: having located snippets of obscure music with creative
and dance-floor potential they were often loath to resign the advantage
to snooping rivals. In the same way, the cult of “cratedigging”—whereby
producers would search used record stores for as-yet unused sample
sources—engendered an occlusion, not a celebration, of musical origin.
In 1990 DJ Mark the 45 King, his archival expertise signaled by his title,
opined both this loss of secrecy and the newly available records of fa-
vorite samples and breaks: “I won’t tell you shit, not these days, because
I need that shit to be better than the next guy. . . . People look up to me
because I’m looping up records that haven’t been used before. I have to
buy all the breakbeats records to know what not to use.”50
Though sampling was identified as a technique congruent with a lon-
ger, common musical heritage, such was often complicated by hip hop
producers’ efforts to construct their own uncommon musical successes
within what could be understood as an autonomous hip hop tradition;
while aspects of cultural memory and memorial were in play, so too
were self-interested exploitations of the forgotten and the unknown. The
complexities of this intergenerational musical relationship were also to
be found in social contexts much broader and harder.
Generation
As soon as it had achieved a national audience, hip hop began to cause
moral panic, and not just on the part of that ageless commentator figure
who has for many decades regarded white youth’s interest in a new black
musical form as the beginning of the end. Though Tipper Gore’s PMRC
was among the first voices objecting to rap, in the early 1990s a number
of other crusades were launched by elders within the African American
community, most notably Jesse Jackson and C. Delores Tucker.51 Vili-
fied as degrading by one generation, posited as authentic reportage by
another, hip hop—and gangsta rap especially—became a new faultline
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across which black intergenerational bonds were stretched and broken.

It wasn’t only familiar objections to profanity; when, around this time,
Sista Souljah reported having been part of a panel that had inadver-
tently caused great offense to a meeting room full of middle-aged Afri-
can Americans because none of the rappers present had removed their
hats before coming indoors, the mismatch of priority and presentation
was at once so trivial and so enormous as to suggest profound discord
within some of these relationships.52
Certainly this generation of hip hop artists and audiences, born be-
tween the mid-1960s and early 1970s, had during its youth witnessed a
dramatic fragmentation in the African American family.53 In 1960, 74%
of African American families were headed by a married couple, and 22%
by women alone; by 1980, married couples headed 55% of families, and
single women 41%.54 Divorce rates had drastically increased, from 104
per 1,000 in 1970 to 220 per 1,000 in 1982, and the same was true of out-
of-wedlock births, which by 1983 accounted for 55% of black newborns;
nearly 60% of these children were born to children under 17. Like many
before her, the sociologist K. Sue Jewell notes that while African Ameri-
can families had often not conformed to the “white,” nuclear model, this
had not historically signaled a crisis, since routine poverty and displace-
ment had fostered other networks of care.55 Yet these were under attack
in a time of general economic stratification and separation. By the late
1980s, poverty and disruption among working-class black families were
at crisis levels. In the two decades following the civil rights movement’s
great legal successes, many black communities had seen middle-class
members remove their professional incomes, social investment, and
tax dollars from urban centers, leaving a growing underclass—the rug
pulled out from under them by Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of social
support—to the vanishingly small mercies of alcohol and drugs, and
then to a militarized police force and a privatized prison industry eager
for custom.56
It is a common scholarly claim that traditions are invented and cul-
tural memories are mobilized at times of social change or trauma, and
it is possible to see hip hop’s sampling of older generations’ music as a
similar kind of operation.57 Certainly some rappers were eager to present
their methods in this light. Daddy-O of Stetsasonic reasoned in 1990:
People always looked at the hip-hop movement as if you’re sam-
pling to get paid but we were sampling for all reasons. There was
a gap in terms of the black community since the Vietnam War that
looked like it didn’t even begin to come together til we began to
sample records. Previous to the Vietnam War there were a lot of
families that was tight and together but after the War it created a
whole different light—there started to be more and more separa-
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tion between parent and child. . . . But . . . Stetsasonic does a record
like “Float On”—now check the signs! There’s a parent that’s in the
living room listening to Joe Sample or Anita Baker and the kids are
in the back listening to Stet, Public Enemy, NWA . . . but the “Float
On” record comes on and all of a sudden there’s a parent saying,
“Boy, what you doin’ in my records?!”—and he’s like “That’s not
your record, that’s my record!” . . . “Well, I like that one—that’s
one rap record I like!” and they begin to understand each other
again. Maybe an argument starts up “Oh I like the original better”
or “They’re just copyin’!”—but the issue is now the father and son
have something in common. It begins to bring them back together!58
Asked about rap’s sampling of jazz in the same year, KRS-One offered (or
improvised) a similar response, one in concert with the aims of Outlaw
and Serequeberhan’s traditionary hermeneutics: “Rap and jazz,” he said,
“are ultimately saying that if they combine it means a consciousness of
one generation to another has combined and some sort of revolutionary
standpoint can come out of that.”59
But if sampling of jazz represented such a cultural reunification across
history, then, according to the ways it was employed, it also represented
the class differences that existed within African American culture in the
present. Somewhat removed from KRS-One’s “revolutionary standpoint”
was the social vision that Guru had for a progressive black future. “I
don’t think there’s going to be one big leader like Malcolm or Martin
Luther King, who changes it all,” the rapper said in 1990 while discuss-
ing the Spike Lee film that “Jazz Thing” accompanied. “It’s gonna be a
lot of heads doing it from different angles. Doctors, lawyers, politicians,
preachers, musicians, painters . . . whoever.”60 For Guru—son of a judge
and a school-system director, college educated, once a social worker, as
a rapper tellingly named—cohesion and advancement were to arrive at
the behest of a professional black corpus; the didactic shots of cultural
memory that constituted Guru’s narratives on “Jazz Thing” and “Jazz
Music” were reflective of that faith in formal organization, and, indeed,
of his own youthful induction into jazz.61 Discussing his first collabora-
tion with the trumpeter Donald Byrd, made under the name Jazzmatazz,
Guru recalled:
I was familiar with Donald’s style from college and before that. My
godfather has all his Blue Note and earlier work. My godfather is
like a fanatic. I used to go and try and borrow money from him to
go to see the George Clinton show or to go to a party. He would
always put me on the spot. I’d go to the house with my little posse
and say “I need 20 bucks.” He’d say “Come on in and sit down.
I’ll be right with you.” And he had these giant speakers like up
here and I was down here. He’d say “Sit down” and start playing
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some Coltrane or Sonny Rollins or Betty Carter. He’d start giving

it to us. I’d be sitting there hoping he was going to just give me
the money and he’s like “Feel this? Do you feel this? This is jazz.
This is real. This is rare.” He was a high school Principal and this
was the way he’d unwind at the end of the day, listening to jazz.
It was an influence on me.62
Unlike that pragmatic creative use of jazz’s sonic history made by Ali
Shaheed or even Guru’s partner DJ Premier, Guru’s raps are full of factual
content and cultural advocacy (“This is the scene that our forefathers
knew / Go get you crew, I know they’ll get into / Jazz Music”); function-
ing as a vehicle of historical transmission they are virtual restagings of
the rapper’s experience in front of one of his extended family members’
speakers, the authoritative, educational tone lingering.
I want to pause in this family setting to reflect, finally, on the methods
through which musico-cultural “memories” might be transmitted across
subjectivities and generations. It has been common for writers address-
ing cultural memory in hip hop sampling to turn, somewhat strangely,
to words uttered by a character in Toni Morrison’s Beloved in order to
address this problem.63 At one point in Morrison’s novel, the character
Sethe articulates her concept of “rememory.” Here, images of the past
are encountered not only by those who experienced them, but also by
those now occupying the spaces those images once inhabited: interper-
sonal memories haunt landscapes and their contemporary occupants
like ghosts. Marianne Hirsch has accounted for the same phenomenon,
rather less mystically, in work on what she calls “postmemory.” This
concept, Hirsch writes,
is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from
history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful
and very particular form of memory precisely because its connec-
tion to its subject or source is mediated not through recollection
but through an imaginative investment and creation. This is not to
say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly
connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience of
those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their
birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the
previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither
understood nor recreated.64
There could hardly be a better description of this hip hop generation,
brought up after the dissipation of the great civil rights moment, sur-
rounded from birth by that moment’s social ruins and sonic relics, which,
at the turn of the 1990s, were being cobbled together artfully to form a
contemporary testimony. Hirsch’s moving study, at the center of which
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is the distant but ever-present holocaust, is of family photographs that

she recalls from her childhood homes. But some of those rap producers
who made extensive use of jazz materials were responding to family
albums of a different kind. In 2002 Q-Tip—formerly of A Tribe Called
Quest, and by now named Kamaal Fareed—reported that he grew up in
a household “filled with music” and shared with a jazz fan father: “My
father listened to Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. My
first memorable jazz experience was my father singing Oscar Brown Jr.’s
‘Dat Dere’ to me when I was nine years old.”65 Pete Rock reported that
his father had a collection of over 7,000 records, and a great number of
other producers have reported similar backgrounds.66 For these many
producers and rappers, the familiarization with and search for African
American musical sound began long before their own creative work
did, and in the home, in the family, amid a tradition in progress. When,
grown, they began to make their own music, sample material was not
chosen without such a long-developed frame of reference—aesthetic,
historical, familial, what Pierre Bourdieu would call a “habitus”—al-
ready firmly in place.67 An early, social experience of music, music usu-
ally but by no means exclusively African American, undoubtedly im-
bued any individual creative act with a priori historicity.
Certainly this would not have always been a conscious consideration,
and, as I have shown, questions of creative pragmatics and of individual
agency within those boundaries would later intervene. There is room
for resentment of the obligations placed upon the younger generational
partner in the theory of postmemory, and here—once again—any inter-
generational contract seemingly heralded by sampling was accompanied
by differences and ambivalences that render an idea of the practice as a
kind of cultural-historical cement too simplistic. Stetsasonic’s “Talkin’ All
That Jazz” was later generally identified as the first example of a hip hop
attempt to incorporate jazz history into its own practice. But if it did so,
it also launched an attack on those African American elders who held a
distinctly low opinion of rap and sampling (indeed, to this extent it was a
perfect embodiment of the trend in all its complexity). Stetsasonic’s track
was written in response to a 1988 radio rant delivered against sampling
by James Mtume, the son of the bebop saxophonist Jimmy Heath who,
before becoming a radio personality, had been a member of one of Miles
Davis’s 1970s groups and a successful musician in his own right. Nelson
George reports that Mtume complained that rappers formed “the first
generation of African-Americans not to be extending the range of the
music,” and that rap recordings “were nothing but Memorex music.”68
The group’s much-quoted riposte shows how intergenerational con-
flicts were, whatever Daddy-O’s later theorization, stirred up as much
as soothed by the rappers’ practice:
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Tell the truth, James Brown was old

’Til Eric and Rak’ came out with “I Got Soul”
Rap brings back old R&B, and if we would not,
People would have forgot
The expected dynamics of intergenerational memory were reversed.
Instead of applauding sampling’s supposed atavism, the elder Mtume
chided young musicians for not being forward-looking enough (this
was the jazz attitude that some hip hop producers had identified with).
By the same token, it was the young who formed the past to be remem-
bered. Q-Tip’s famous rhyme on “Excursions,” delivered over a bass line
sampled from an Art Blakey record and found on A Tribe Called Quest’s
1991 album The Low End Theory, is often cited in discussions of jazz rap.
Q-Tip raps that when, as a teenager, he listened to hip hop,
My pops used to say it reminded him of bebop
I said, “well daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles?”
Way that Bobby Brown is just ampin’ like Michael
But what is never pointed out is that, as much as the elder, it is here the
younger who sets the styles’ musical similarities in historical context: not
only are past generations subject to criticism, they are also informed of the
meaning of their own experiences, and hear their own experiences being
reformed by—and for the benefit of—the community’s junior partners.69
Perhaps all living, creative traditions are defined by this dual embrace
and rejection of what came before, and the constructivist reading of the
past in the service of contemporary advancement.
The Jazz Canon

As previously suggested, these rap developments were taking place while
jazz was undergoing a resurgence of sorts, led, embodied, and outspo-
kenly theorized by the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis, born in 1961,
came to prominence in the early 1980s playing music modeled on 1960s
post-bop. But he and a number of his associates soon advanced further
into the past, beginning to perform (and compositionally pastiche) the
music of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. The trumpeter quickly
became spearhead of a movement toward jazz’s institutionalization and
classicization: in 1987 he began an involvement with New York’s Lincoln
Center, eventually taking up a series of advisory roles for the Center’s
multimillion-dollar jazz program, setting out at this time to construct—
through high-profile performance and educational scheduling, public
pronouncement, and broadcasting consultancy work—a jazz canon that
would seem to admit no musician to have come to prominence after 1965.70
As has been much-argued, the Marsalisites have long seemed to see jazz’s
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developmental stage as ending just after Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959),
and they have made it their project, musical and critical, to consolidate
efforts made up to that point.71
It is striking, reading the pronouncements Marsalis was making around
1990, that the issues broached by some of hip hop’s historically minded
producers were also central for the jazz trumpeter—specifically those
generational ruptures in African American society and cultural praxis,
and compensatory attempts to construct (a rather masculine father-son)
traditional continuity. But the trumpeter articulated his distaste toward
rap, and, as we have seen, the noncompliment was often returned by
self-consciously experimental hip hop artists: if in interviews hip hop
producers sampling jazz sometimes seemed to share an agenda with their
counterpart Marsalis, then they absolutely refused the musical-stylistic
canonic definition and doctrine the trumpeter and many of his peers were
helping to establish.
This image of jazz at the end of its history in some ways informed
hip hop ideas about the music: an imagined archetype of the jazz musi-
cian and jazz creativity, Guru’s “Jazz Thing” invocation of great names,
which closes with the Marsalis canon’s own terminal innovators, Ornette
Coleman and John Coltrane. But there the two schools’ interests in a jazz
past diverged. It was a composite “jazz” that was being formed by these
rappers: while video visual images were often plucked from the 1930s
and 1940s, and while 1940s and 1950s bebop was often cited in interview
and song, it was very rarely jazz from these periods that was sampled;
indeed, most of the hip hop producers’ sample sources were taken from
records of the 1970s, that is, music that had been recorded during their
own childhoods, and music absolutely excluded on grounds of commer-
cialism from the conservative Marsalisite jazz history simultaneously
being constructed.
What was it, in the final analysis, that these hip hop artists were “re-
membering”? What “tradition” were they extending? Contained within
Gang Starr’s “Jazz Thing” are several examples of rap’s simultaneous
acceptance and rejection of, and ambivalence and enthusiasm for, the
musical past. Sonic citations of jazz’s most iconic names—Billie Holiday,
Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong—are contained in
the track’s collage-like introduction, only a few seconds long; once the
song proper begins, such early and mid-century jazz signatures are all
but abandoned, and Guru’s jazz history unfolds over a track based on
Kool and the Gang’s 1971 “Duji,” a piece made by musicians who had
in the late 1960s abandoned jazz to find fame with funk and R&B, a song
whose title referenced the community-wrecking narcotic beloved of so
many of those derelict jazz musicians reviled by KRS-One.72 Whatever
the chronology and canon described by Guru’s lyrics, whatever the hats
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worn in the video, it was not the sound or singular aesthetic of “classic”
jazz that underpinned Gang Starr’s memorial.
This was the sampling practice’s rule, not its exception. A study of hip
hop albums made in the very late 1980s and early 1990s by groups to
a greater or lesser extent associated with the jazz rap trend shows that
those “jazz” artists most often sampled were Lou Donaldson, Roy Ayers,
Cannonball Adderley, Bob James, Eddie Harris, Tom Scott, Ramsey
Lewis, Les McCann, and Grover Washington Jr. (see appendix for a full
listing of hip hop albums analyzed and sampled artists identified).73 All
of those artists had begun their careers as jazz musicians in the 1950s
and 1960s, when that designation was relatively uncomplicated. But
by the 1970s their music accorded not at all to either the bebop idea
of jazz as an underground music—as suggested by various musicians
above—or the neoclassical contingent’s idea of canonical jazz. Instead
they were the leading lights of that decade’s fusion, and what would
become known as “smooth” jazz, the “pop music” against which Mar-
salis and his ilk would later react. It is from this repertoire that the
vast majority of hip hop’s jazz samples were taken; “classic,” canonical
music by Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, or Charles Mingus crops up
in only one or two cases.
This trend is explicable in several ways. Certainly producers’ prior
familiarity with such music, aided by recordings’ prior commercial suc-
cess, was important. Those “jazz” records most often turned to by hip
hop producers were recorded between 1968 and 1980, the years that
mark that producer generation’s childhood and early adolescence (not
to mention the jazz neoclassicists’ dead zone); as a graph derived from
the analysis shows—the graphic, incidentally, representing the bureau-
cratic historical death of whatever living memory the sampling operation
really embodied—the artists most often sampled were those who had
most often placed on the Billboard R&B album during that time.
“Classic” jazz records, made before the producers’ own lives began
and tending to achieve far less commercial success, were comparatively
alien. But they were also less formally compatible with established hip
hop practice. Without quite putting it in such terms, Chuck D, remem-
bering the 1970s and the early days of rap, had drawn a line between a
no-longer communicative jazz swing and an invigorating funk 8/8. As
an even-eighths style, hip hop was in some ways bound to make more
use of “jazz” records recorded in the 1970s, when even that music often
renounced its historic 12/8 basis in favor of even-eighth rhythm:74 rare
attempts to merge samples of swung music with hip hop’s 4/4 beat
sound uneasy.
These pragmatic explanations of widely taken decisions regarding
jazz sample material—centering on availability and fit—would suggest
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Figure 1. Sampled
artists’ commercial
success
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that, whatever the power of the historical, creative expediency was at

least as important as any other concern. But it is important to underscore
that “jazz” was here being constructed from decades’ worth of signifiers,
appearing in an entirely contemporary context as part of an all-at-once,
antilinear historical presentation. This was a critical, constructive her-
meneutic, the sociomusical past a partner in dialogue as much as, and
often rather than, the topic of conversation. The concerns of collective
history and of individual creative agency were not finally separable, the
one—as ever—unimaginable without the other.
Conclusions
It would be difficult to fully subscribe to an idea of hip hop’s sampling
of jazz as the recovery and recirculation of an African American past
“from below.” The content of hip hop’s historical re-presentation was
deeply reliant on the workings of the culture industry; the kinds of jazz
that had been culturally and commercially marginalized during the 1970s
remained marginal in sampling’s technological recovery. In one line of
“Jazz Thing,” Guru wonders, apropos of Ornette Coleman’s work, “why
the bankers couldn’t use it.” But “it,” canonical jazz, was also largely be-
yond use for he and DJ Premier, that song being founded instead upon
the genuinely popular African American dance music that had helped
render “classic” jazz all but invisible in the 1970s, and which shared a
rhythmic vocabulary with 1990s hip hop. If sampling was a quasi-schol-
arly writing of musical history, it was bad history: selective, presentist,
and self-contradictory.
But, as Pierre Nora might have observed, it was not in an “archeologi-
cal” mode that the practice was most historically significant, and it is
equally difficult to understand sampling as a simply ahistorical, simply
pragmatic activity. If Gang Starr’s music was an example of a wider (if
tacit) acknowledgment of the limits of the two forms’ technical compat-
ibility, then while that separation was being enforced musically it was
simultaneously being contested verbally and semiotically, rappers often
drawing attention to the names and practices of a jazz past, this a com-
pacted, delinearized history presented at the indirect and perhaps some-
times unrecognized behest of familial experiences and record shelves.75
Writing on hip hop that explores or contests ideas of the music as a
vehicle for African American cultural memory has often overlooked what
Susannah Radstone has called memory’s “equivocations . . . concerning
truth, embodiment, location and the temporality of hope.” “Though the
scales may swing between, say, invention/tradition and reflection/repre-
sentation,” Radstone writes, “the ‘fragile value’ of memory resides in its
continued capacity to hold, rather than to collapse these equivocations.”76
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300 Perchard
Such is manifest in hip hop’s self-interested presentation of a composite

jazz tradition—a creative reading of history that was complimented by,
but in contrast to, that much less equivocal Marsalisite jazz canon then
also being devised. This is not at all to argue that memory or history
routinely functioned as a creative motive in hip hop: rather, that it was
a sociomusical past that provided the ground on which creative work,
however historically ambivalent or insignificant, could be constructed.
So while I have argued that those early traditionary understandings of
sampling lacked nuance and grounding in evidence, I do not reject them
in favor of a more recent pragmatic argument that fails fully to account
for the lived processes of musicosocial inculcation and orientation that
shaped producers’ creative possibilities. Indeed, the depth of its historical
grounding, the brilliance of its experimental methods, and the liveliness
of its insider debate meant that hip hop was a musical culture far more
alive to the benefits, demands, and impositions of memory and history
than simply atavistic or simply pragmatic theorizations could describe;
the words of the artists cited here suggest that we should instead consider
these ideas as part of a critical, musical-historical discourse—constructed
by producers themselves in advance of academic interest—in which con-
temporary creative agency was ever intertwined with representations of
and relationships to the past, both productive and problematic.
Appendix
Artists Sampled
An analysis shows that it was more successful artists—defined here as those

who had placed most often on the Billboard R&B album chart—who were most
often sampled. The albums analyzed to produce this graph and table, recorded
between 1989 and 1994, were A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels
and the Paths of Rhythm (1990), The Low End Theory (1991) and Midnight Maraud-
ers (1993); Black Sheep’s A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (1991) and Non-Fiction (1994);
Brand Nubian’s One For All (1990), In God We Trust (1993) and Everything Is Ev-
erything (1994); De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising (1989), De La Soul Is Dead
(1991) and Buhloone Mindstate (1993); Gang Starr’s No More Mr Nice Guy (1989),
Step in the Arena (1991), Daily Operation (1992) and Hard to Earn (1994); Jungle
Brothers’ Straight Out the Jungle (1988), Done by the Forces of Nature (1989) and
J Beez wit the Remedy (1993); KMD’s Mr Hood (1991) and Black Bastards (recorded
1993, released 2001); Leaders of the New School’s A Future Without a Past (1991)
and T.I.M.E (1993); Main Source’s Breaking Atoms (1991) and Fuck What You Think
(1994); Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s Mecca and the Soul Brother (1992) and The Main
Ingredient (1994); UMCs’ Fruits of Nature (1991).
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Artist sampled No. of samples No. chart albums
Lou Donaldson 13 8
Roy Ayers 10 18
Cannonball Adderley 10 9
Bob James 9 14
Eddie Harris 8 12
Tom Scott 7 4
Ramsey Lewis 6 22
Les McCann 6 5
Grover Washington, Jr. 6 19
Ahmad Jamal 6 4
Weather Report 5 6
Young-Holt Trio / Unlimited 4 2
Quincy Jones 4 14
Milt Jackson 4 0
Johnny Hammond Smith 4 0
Freddie Hubbard 4 11
Donald Byrd 4 10
Lee Morgan 3 3
Joe Farrell 3 0
Headhunters 3 1
Crusaders 3 21
Brother Jack McDuff 3 5
Billy Cobham 3 3
Michael Urbaniak 2 0
Lonnie Smith 2 4
Jimmy Smith 2 12
Grant Green 2 3
George Benson 2 12
Gary Bartz 2 1
Deodato 2 4
Charlie Parker 2 0
Blue Mitchell 2 1
Blackbyrds 2 8
Art Blakey 2 0
Willis “Gator” Jackson 1 1
Vic Juris 1 0
Three Sounds 1 0
Thelonious Monk 1 0
Stanley Turrentine 1 14
Stan Getz 1 0
Ronnie Laws 1 9
Ronnie Foster 1 0
Pharoah Sanders 1 3
Monty Alexander 1 0
Modern Jazz Quartet 1 0
Miles Davis 1 9
McCoy Tyner 1 2
Maynard Ferguson 1 0
Mahavishnu Orchestra 1 0
Lucky Thompson 1 0
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Artist sampled No. of samples No. chart albums
Louis Armstrong 1 0
Junior Mance 1 0
Johnny Lytle 1 1
Joe Williams 1 0
Joe Sample 1 6
JJ Johnson 1 0
Jimmy Ponder 1 0
Jimmy McGriff 1 2
Jack DeJohnette 1 0
Ike Quebec 1 0
Eric Dolphy 1 0
Duke Pearson 1 0
Dick Hyman 1 2
Chico Hamilton 1 2
Charles Mingus 1 0
Charles Earland 1 6
Carlos Garnett 1 0
Cal Tjader 1 2
Alphonse Mouzon 1 3
Notes
Thanks to Chris Kennett and the journal’s two anonymous referees for their helpful com-
ments on earlier versions of this article.
1. William Eric Perkins, “The Rap Attack: An Introduction,” in Droppin’ Science: Critical
Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture, ed. William Eric Perkins (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1996), 9; Kyra D. Gaunt, “The Veneration of James Brown and George
Clinton in Hip-Hop Music: Is It Live! Or Is It Re-memory?,” in Popular Music—Style and
Identity, ed. Will Straw et al (Montreal: Centre for Research on Canadian Industries and
Institutions, 1995), 118; Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of
Postmodernism (Stony Brook: State University of New York Press, 1995), 26, 117; Tricia Rose,
Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
University Press, 1994), 79. Other commentators on sampling interpreted the practice
as a quintessentially postmodern rather than essentially African American practice; see
Andrew Goodwin, “Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction,”
in On Record, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990),
258–73, and critiques of Goodwin in Rose, Black Noise, 83–84, and Gaunt, “The Veneration
of James Brown,” 117.
2. Joseph Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop (Middletown, CT: Wes-
leyan University Press, 2004), 146.
3. Ibid., 148.
4. Paul Rogers, “Smooth Operators,” Hip-Hop Connection 40 (May 1992): 13.
5. Schloss, Making Beats, 157.
6. See Wayne Marshall, “Giving Up Hip-Hop’s Firstborn: A Quest for the Real after the
Death of Sampling,” Callaloo 29, no. 3 (2006): 868–92.
7. Guthrie Ramsey Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2003), 1–2; Joanna Demers, “Sampling the 1970s in Hip-Hop,”
Popular Music 22, no. 1 (2003): 41.
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8. Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 54–55.
9. This often-reprinted article was part of a massive, multiauthored study of memory
in France overseen and edited by Nora and published in English as Rethinking France: Les
Lieux de Mémoire, vols. 1–4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
10. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations
26 (Spring 1989): 9, 22.
11. In addition to its discussion in Fabre and O’Meally’s introduction, Nora’s work is
considered here in essays by David W. Blight, VéVé Clark, and Nellie Y. McKay. Geneviève
Fabre and Robert O’Meally, eds, History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994).
12. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso,
1993), 72–110; Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from
Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35–57.
13. W. F. Allen et al, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: Cosimo, 2010); W.E.B. Du
Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). This idea is further
explored in Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003).
14. I’m grateful to Anthony Pryer for this observation.
15. For a classic example, see LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], “The Changing Same (R&B
and the New Black Music),” in Black Music (1966; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980),
180–211.
16. Arthur A. Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” in The New Negro, ed. A. Locke
(New York: Touchstone, 1997), 231.
17. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G.
Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989).
18. I think we can understand recordings as texts without endorsing what Paul Gilroy
has called poststructuralism’s “all-encompassing textuality,” one that would “enthrone
the literary critic as mistress or master of the domain of creative human communication.”
See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 77. For more on the “text” in hermeneutic method, see Paul
Ricoeur, “What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” and “The Model of the Text:
Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed.
and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 145–64;
197–221.
19. See Lucius T. Outlaw’s essays “Philosophy, Hermeneutics, Social-Political Theory:
Critical Thought in the Interest of African-Americans,” in Philosophy Born of Struggle: An-
thology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917, ed. Leonard Harris (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/
Hunt, 1983), 60–87, and “Language and Consciousness: Toward a Hermeneutic of Black
Culture,” Cultural Hermeneutics 1 (1974): 403–13.
20. Tsenay Serequeberhan, Our Heritage: The Past in the Present of African-American and
African Existence (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), xiv, 12.
21. Hip hop rose to prominence at the time of a deepening mood of crisis in the African
American social sphere, as I discuss later, and it may be that in emphasizing sampling’s
historicity liberal scholars wanted to describe in the music an engaged, organic cultural
consciousness and continuity that thrived despite growing social misfortune (an attitude
encouraged by the era’s highly visible, politically engaged rap); by the same token, in
positioning hip hop as part of a much grander tradition, these writers were also claim-
ing cultural legitimacy—and scholarly credibility—for a music then subject to continual,
high-profile media and political derogation.
22. Outside the scope of this article, as the saying goes, is the jazz response to this trend:
during the first half of the 1990s Greg Osby, Branford Marsalis, Miles Davis (posthumously),
and others released music defined by its instrumental jazz foreground and hip hop beats
behind.
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304 Perchard
23. Janine McAdams and Havelock Nelson, “The New Jazz Swing Takes Shape: Artists
Are Fusing Styles Into a New Form,” Billboard 104, no. 35 (Aug. 29, 1992): 21.
24. See n. 2 above.
25. Joseph Patel, “Jungle Brothers: Straight Out the Jungle, Done by the Forces of Nature,
De La Soul: 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul Is Dead, Buhloone Mindstate, A Tribe Called
Quest: People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, The Low End Theory, Midnight
Marauders,” in Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide, ed. Oliver Wang (Toronto: ECW
Press, 2003), 97.
26. Wendy K, “Talking ’bout Jazz and Rap,” Hip-Hop Connection 19 (August 1990): 33.
27. Ronin Ro, “The Definitive Gang Starr Story: Not Just a Jazz Thing,” The Source 55
(April 1994): 69.
28. An example of that delta image can be found in the narration of the final episode of
Ken Burns’s PBS series Jazz, “A Masterpiece by Midnight” (2001).
29. Tom Perchard, Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture (London: Equinox, 2006), 196.
30. David H. Rosenthal, “Jazz in the Ghetto: 1950–70,” Popular Music 7, no. 1 (1988): 55;
Tom Perchard, Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture (London: Equinox, 2006), 38–41. See
also Rosenthal’s Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955–65 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992).
31. Interview with the author, New York City, Dec. 11, 2003.
32. On the Coltrane poem, see James C. Hall, Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture
and the American Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 148–50.
33. Some birthdates: DJ Premier (Gang Starr), b. 1966; Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe
Called Quest), b. 1970; Pete Rock (Pete Rock and CL Smooth), b. 1970; Large Professor
(Main Source), b. 1972.
34. The didactic (if not paternalist) jazz history in rap form was evidently catching. The
jazz vibraphonist and producer Mike Manieri, at that time also scouting inroads into hip
hop entrepreneurialism, commented of rappers he had met at the studio he ran: “I was
amazed to discover that they had never heard any of the music of Miles or ’Trane and so I
started playing them records. We came up with this idea of doing a rap about the history
of jazz.” Cited in K, “Talking ’bout Jazz and Rap,” 34.
35. I will return to this idea below.
36. Rare rap forays into such terrain, such as LL Cool J’s “I Need Love,” were the object
of angst and ridicule from many rap listeners.
37. The show was Dr Dre’s Operating Room; a tape circulates. The “reggae” refers to the
faux-Jamaican accents and dancehall elements of “The Bridge Is Over,” a 1986 BDP record
under discussion. Similarly, a member of the Jungle Brothers told Straight No Chaser in
1990: “Other generations, they ate, slept, walked and talked jazz. We’d hear the music but
because we were young we couldn’t decipher it, but later you get into it.” Peter Bradshaw,
Kathryn Willgress et al., “Hip-Hop Jazz: The New Generation,” Straight No Chaser 9 (Au-
tumn 1990): 26.
38. Mark Dery, “Public Enemy: Confrontation,” in That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies
Reader, ed. Murray Foreman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 412.
39. Ibid., 418.
40. Mark Sinker, “Black Science Fiction,” The Wire 96 (February 1992): 31. I am never-
theless somewhat uneasy about (common) attempts to adopt this bricolage as the African
American musical tradition’s defining characteristic. High-value notions of originality (and
related intellectual property laws), which might be used to counterpose this characteriza-
tion, are not otherwise universal—indeed, are arguably relatively peculiar to Western art
music, and only then in its Romantic-modernist phase (as suggested by the parody mass,
pastiche opera and polystylistic collage of the sixteenth, eighteenth, and latter-twentieth
centuries).
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41. Janine McAdams and Havelock Nelson, “Hip-Hop Puts Fresh Spin on Jazz: Artists
Galore Bring on ‘New Jazz Swing,’” Billboard 104, no. 34 (Aug. 22, 1992): 24.
42. Bradshaw et al., “Hip-Hop Jazz,” 26.
43. See Harold Horowitz, The American Jazz Music Audience (Washington, DC: National
Jazz Service Organization, 1986), accessed December 2010, http://www.eric.ed.gov/
PDFS/ED280757.pdf; and Scott DeVeaux, Jazz in America: Who’s Listening, National En-
dowment for the Arts Research Division Report 31 (Carson, CA: Seven Locks Press, 1995).
44. Ro, “The Definitive Gang Starr Story,” 68. Limitations of space prevent a full examina-
tion of the complexities of these class associations, which I will only sketch here. Justin A.
Williams writes that since by the 1980s jazz had become widely accepted as a “highbrow
art music” associated with “affluence, sophistication, and a highbrow aesthetic,” when in
the early 1990s rap groups began to make use of jazz styles they were aligning themselves
with a “serious music” so as to legitimize and differentiate their practice from an emer-
gent, “commercial” rap mainstream, and from pop music in general (Justin A. Williams,
“Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop: Theoretical Frameworks and Case Studies,” PhD thesis,
University of Nottingham, 2009, 95, 100, 104). Williams constructs his argument by way of
reference to A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets, but looking outside such groups’
“conscious” postures—and Guru’s street posturing, just discussed—it’s possible to see
hip hop’s partial appropriation of jazz’s affluent associations (see John MacDonough,
“Jazz Sells,” Down Beat 58, no. 10 [October 1991]: 34) as an early articulation of what has
been characterized as the form’s decisive early-nineties accommodation with a peculiarly
American materialism, as in Eithne Quinn, Nuthin’ but a G Thang: The Culture and Com-
merce of Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). The yuppie symbol-
ogy operative in films like Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (1990) is, for example, at work on
the covers of some Jazzmattazz releases, and in the promo video for Eric B and Rakim’s
“Don’t Sweat the Technique” (1992); when Rakim delivered his line about distant jazz in
the 1987 video for “I Ain’t No Joke” he was standing in front of a graffiti mural, but now,
rapping over a track full of jazz signifiers—an acoustic bass line borrowed from Ramsey
Lewis’ old rhythm section, a saxophone—he is situated amid a bricolage of pork pie hats,
high-end real estate, and decorative bikini models, jazz and hip hop codes structuring a
masculine fantasy that, full of cool and self-containment though it may be, still finds room
for outrageous sexual and financial success.
45. Havelock Nelson, “Gang Starr Sheds Light on Its Style, Surroundings,” Billboard
104, no. 40 (Oct. 3, 1992): 19; see also Ro, “The Definitive Gang Starr Story,” 69. “As much
as we respect jazz musicians and recognize that their artform is similar to ours,” Premier
told Nelson in this interview, “this is just another era. Yeah, our music has a jazzy feel to
it, but at the same time, it’s rugged. It’s hardcore rap.”
46. Peter Bradshaw, “The Metaphysics of a Jazzhiphop Thing,” Straight No Chaser 10
(Winter 1990): 9.
47. McAdams and Nelson, “Hip-Hop Puts Fresh Spin on Jazz,” 24.
48. Dery, “Public Enemy,” 419.
49. Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads” (1988), for instance, adheres to
popular music convention in having not just a middle eight after the second chorus, but
a middle eight at which point the key changes.
50. Simon Trask, “King for a Day,” Hip-Hop Connection 5 (June 1989): 10–11.
51. See Quinn, Nuthin’ but a G Thang, 149–52.
52. See Souljah’s interview (seemingly conducted in 1990) in Joseph D. Eure and James G.
Spady, eds., Nation Conscious Rap (New York: PC International Press, 1991), 236–37.
53. The impact of this had, of course, been unevenly distributed: it’s important not to
overstate the class homogeneity of either rappers or their audiences, even during this
period.
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306 Perchard
54. To be sure, similar trends afflicted white Americans: see Mark Fine, Andrew I.
Schwebel, and Linda James-Myers, “Family Stability in Black Families: Values Underlying
Three Different Perspectives,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 1987):
4–5. The exponential growth of single parent families throughout the 1970s and 1980s is
also shown in a US Census Bureau Current Population Report, “Living Arrangements
of Black Children Under 18 Years Old: 1960 to Present,” accessed August 2010, http://
www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam.html.
55. K. Sue Jewell, Survival of the African American Family: The Institutional Impact of US
Social Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 15, 19–22.
56. See Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 3rd ed. (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2007), 118–215.
57. See, for example, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective
Memory and Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 54; Susan-
nah Radstone, “Working with Memory: An Introduction,” in Memory and Methodology, ed.
Radstone (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 8–9.
58. Andy Sangster, “Blood, Sweat and No Tears!,” Hip-Hop Connection 18 (July 1990): 20.
59. K, “Talking ’bout Jazz and Rap,” 32.
60. Bradshaw, “Metaphysics of a Jazzhiphop Thing,” 9.
61. On Guru’s family, see his obituary: Jon Caramanica, “Guru, Rapper Known for Social
Themes, Dies at 48,” New York Times, April 20, 2010, accessed August 2010, http://www
.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/arts/music/21guru.html?hpw.
62. James McCarthy, “A New Perspective: Donald Byrd and Guru,” Straight No Chaser
22 (Summer 1993): 24.
63. See Gaunt, “Veneration of James Brown and George Clinton,” 118; Ramsey, Race
Music, 32; Ed Pavlic, “Rap, Soul and the Vortex at 33.3rpm: Hip-Hop’s Implements and
African American Modernisms,” Callaloo 29, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 957.
64. Marianne M. Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22.
65. John Murph, “Q-Tip/Kamaal Fareed: Jazz, Blues and the Abstract Truth,” Jazz Times
32, no. 2 (March 2002): 38.
66. Rogers, “Smooth Operators,” 15.
67. For applications of the concept of habitus in various related contexts, see Pierre
Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randall Johnson, trans. Richard Nice (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
68. Nelson George, “Sample This,” in That’s the Joint!, ed. Foreman and Neal, 437.
69. In the context of cultural memory, see Jan Assman, “Collective Memory and Cultural
Identity,” New German Critique 65 (Spring–Summer 1995): 125–33, and Wulf Kansteiner,
“Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,”
History and Theory 41 (May 2002): 179–97.
70. Marsalis said in 1992, “We need a curriculum, we need a canon, we need to find ways
to get the school boards interested in seeing that American culture is taught.” Howard
Reich, “Wynton’s Decade,” Down Beat 59, no. 12 (December 1992): 18.
71. In 2000, Marsalis acted as artistic advisor for the documentarist Ken Burns’s PBS
series Jazz, a nineteen-hour, ten-episode production accompanied by twenty-two compila-
tion CDs and books. Jazz is surely the most controversial and widely debated history of
the music yet seen—it gave the music mainstream media exposure it has rarely (if ever)
enjoyed in such concentration since the 1940s—but the program was heavily criticized by
many commentators for its unthinking adherence to Marsalis’s own aesthetic and historical
ideology; crucially, many of the developments made by jazz musicians in recent decades
were spurned by the program makers, who infamously covered the period 1960–2000 in
the last hour of the ten-hour series. See Alan Stanbridge, “Burns, Baby, Burns: Jazz History
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as a Contested Cultural Site,” The Source / Jazz Research Journal 1, no. 4 (2004): 81–100; John
Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006).
72. Similarly, Gang Starr’s earlier “Jazz Music” was based on a track by an artist with
roots in jazz but fingers in R&B, in this case Ramsey Lewis’s 1968 “Les Fleurs” (a piece that
later became famous in its recording by the singer Minnie Ripperton).
73. For more on this, see John Murph, “Spin City: Modern DJs Look to 1970s Jazz for
Beats and Inspiration,” Jazz Times 34, no. 3 (April 2004): 58–67. The result was duplicated
when the analysis was repeated with a slightly different set of hip hop albums. However,
the vagaries of the Billboard chart’s compilation complicate matters, as does the issue of
genre definition. For this survey, in a parody of scientific historical method, I have identi-
fied “jazz” artists as those who appear in a contemporary marker of genre legitimacy,
that is, Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (London: Macmillan, 1988).
This makes no allowance for the poverty of notions of such “legitimacy” and “genre,” or
the stylistic fluidity of musical creativity in general. Similarly, I have made no attempt
to identify the nature of the music sampled as “jazz” or “nonjazz,” only the generic and
career background of the artist. In addition, the Billboard chart concerned was only initi-
ated in 1965, so records made by “canonical” jazz artists before that time evidently would
not appear on it—though almost no records by those musicians at the time matched sales
achieved by those appearing on Billboard R&B charts pre-1965. Caveat lector, then. Samples
were identified and cross-checked by consultation with crowd-sourced and expertly main-
tained (if often reviled) websites www.the-breaks.com and www.whosampled.com (with
a few additions by the author). Information given by these sites, as detailed as they are, is
likely not entirely exhaustive. Chart source: Joel Whitburn, Joel Whitburn’s Top R&B Albums
1965–1998 (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1999).
74. See Alexander Stewart, “‘Funky Drummer’: New Orleans, James Brown and the
Rhythmic Transformation of American Popular Music,” Popular Music 19, no. 3 (2000):
293–318.
75. This is foreshadowed by Premier’s comments on the “roots” of rap, above.
76. Radstone, “Working with Memory,” 8–9.
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Hip Hop Samples Jazz: Dynamics of Cultural Memo y and Musical Tradition in the African

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Hip Hop Samples Jazz:

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made by writers for whom rap’s membership of a musical tradition was

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appraisals were written suggests that Schloss’s argument is not quite as

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in regalia acceptable on campus, and hip hop’s arrival as an object of

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I will take seriously the musicians’ discussion of their work, there is no

Hip Hop Samples Jazz

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black musicians who dominated their rosters—were either bust, near-

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antithetical to the hip hop attitude.36 In a February 1987 WBAU radio

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source led to much theorizing—on the part of journalists and, more-

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project, his real allegiance lay: “Gang Starr is my girlfriend,” he said,

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established status and reassign it to present hip hop. If the concepts of

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across which black intergenerational bonds were stretched and broken.

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some Coltrane or Sonny Rollins or Betty Carter. He’d start giving

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is the distant but ever-present holocaust, is of family photographs that

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Tell the truth, James Brown was old

The Jazz Canon

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that, whatever the power of the historical, creative expediency was at