| ||||||
|
| |||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
|
Quarter pounding eye.net The Quartertones - Hidden In Plain Sight [URBNET Records] By ERROL NAZARETH There is a science to making those snare drums on Hidden in Plain Sight, The Quartertones' debut CD, sound like shotgun blasts. Cue up "Una Mas," the second track on this hugely satisfying disc, turn up the system and you'll feel the beats in your solar plexus. "My preference is when drums are in your face," says Planet Pea, the one in charge of programming and samples. "It's kinda like the J Dilla sound, where the drums are really upfront. Hip-hop's basically all drums and that's my foundation and [bandmate] Serious' and we bring that aesthetic to the band." What's unique about these beats is that Pea produces the majority of them on his Akai MPC-2000 drum machine. If you didn't know this, you could be forgiven for thinking The Quartertones called up ?uestlove to hold it down. "The kick drums gotta have punch, they can't compete with the bass and the snares have to be really loud and have the same velocity as the kick," Pea says, explaining the group's low-end theory. By using programmed drums, loops and "little tricks we do to accentuate the kicks and snares," The Quartertones succeed brilliantly in making it all sound live and organic. "Una Mas" was based on "Playa Playa" (off D'Angelo's Voodoo), Pea explains. "We tried to take that song and make our own version of it. We really tried to capture ?uestlove's drumming style." To ensure the song would have maximum impact on rib cages everywhere, Pea sampled handclaps from a Ronnie Laws record and layered them with handclaps provided by the 'tones. Pea invited Ken Bounca to set up his drum kit in his bedroom, put one mic over his head and got him to play along and then "cut him up and placed him throughout the song." Comprised of Pea, DJ Serious, guitarist Jimmy Green, bassist C5-KO and singer Ms Bates, The Quartertones have arrived at a sound they've been steadily working on for the last nine years. They began creating a buzz at Freestylin', a monthly event held at, natch, Una Mas, where MCs freestyled over jazz, funk and soul grooves provided by the band. All these sounds nestle nicely together on Hidden in Plain Sight but you don't get the impression that this is a structured concept record à la Guru's Jazzmatazz. Equally impressive is how the group walk the fine line between reverence for obvious influences such as Grant Green and outright mimicry of their gods. Pea says that while Jimmy Green and C5 integrate their jazz influences into the group's sound, he brings a little bit of Premier and J Dilla to the table, while Serious and Ms Bates bring their own vibe to the mix. That five people with varying tastes can record such a cohesive record is a testament to the obvious chemistry at work here. The same can't be said of some of the dreadful jazz-meets-hip-hop experiments that seemed all the rage in the late '80s and early '90s. Pea agrees, saying, "There's something about those records that wasn't genuine." "I think GangStarr realized they were on to something with 'Jazz Thing' -- that was on the Mo' Better Blues soundtrack -- and then Guru tried to run with it. Jazzmatazz felt contrived. It felt like he was trying to push it as opposed to it happening naturally. We were really influenced by The Soulquarians and Slum Village so our take is, 'We don't care what other people are doing. Let's do something that feels good to us.'" What sets The Quartertones apart from, say, Courtney Pine (who attempted a jazz/hip-hop fusion on albums like 1996's Modern Day Jazz Stories), is that they've been deeply immersed in these sounds for years and didn't wake up one day thinking how cool it'd be to bring them all together. The approach of artists like Pine, Pea says, resulted in them "not getting a good drum programmer to do their beats. Or they might loop up a breakbeat that's been used 150 times as opposed to finding a producer who really knows what they're doing. "We don't approach making music like, 'This is gonna be a straight-ahead jazz piece with some hip-hop drums,' or 'This is gonna be straight-ahead rapping over some jazzers.' We just combine each flavour to make something new. Nothing is original but you can create originality out of everything." | ||||||
| ||||||
|
 |