TALES OF LOHR: "KASSA OVERALL LIVE AT THIRD MAN RECORDS"
"Straight to acetate" from a hip-hop hyphenate; plus, what is "This Week in Warhol" bid?
Whenever I hear someone say that “all modern hip-hop is garbage,” or that the genre “hasn’t been good since (year speaker graduated from high school),” I realize that what they’re really saying is that they only hear the hip-hop that comes in their direction from the most homogenized, mainstream sources. If the only current hip-hop one encounters is what appears on the “Popular New Releases” tab on your favorite music streaming service, or, God forbid, on terrestrial radio, one can be wholly forgiven for assuming the genre is nothing but monotone mumble riffs delivered by MCs seemingly allergic to the concept of musical dynamics, or pop-leaning dance tracks with a feature verse thrown in to allow the artist to cling to some bare semblance of street cred. If you want to find what’s really worth turning an ear to in present-day hip-hop, you’ve got to put in a little work, stray off the beaten path, and explore artists who, while they may not garner the airplay of the biggest names in the game, are nevertheless forging their own identity within the music, and twisting the form into odd, compelling, and truly exciting shapes.
One such questing performer is MC / drummer Kassa Overall. Born in Seattle, educated at the same high school that spawned Jimi Hendrix and Quincy Jones, trained at Oberlin, steeped in the ever-progressive musical scene of Brooklyn, Overall has brought his idiosyncratic lyrical sense and formidable, sometimes punishing skills behind the kit to collaborations with everyone from Jon Batiste to Yoko Ono. His music is a dense, bold, sometimes almost monolithically overwhelming melange of jazz instrumentation, ambient electronic washes, African polyrhythmic flights, and lyrical interludes interpolated as much for their purely sonic qualities as for Overall’s unique, fiercely perceptive insights on contemporary life and the modern realities of Black living in America. In the process, Overall has garnered a host of admirers in both the hip-hop and jazz communities, and forged a fierce identity at the forefront of both genres’ progressive future-reaching wings.
With his latest release, Kassa Overall Live at Third Man Records (Third Man), the artist lays bare the full extent of his brilliance by presenting his vision via the most stripped-down, nowhere-to-hide aesthetic means imaginable. This five-track LP, capturing a 2022 quintet performance, was recorded at the Third Man label’s Blue Room studio / performance venue in Nashville. Records made at the Blue Room are cut on a lathe designed in 1955. Overdubs are not possible via this format, and there are no retakes, no starting and stopping. It’s one solid shot from the start of the recording to its conclusion, “straight,” as Overall himself puts it at one point, “to acetate!” He adds that “I don’t even know what acetate means, yo. It just sound fire.” Does it ever, as the roughly forty minutes of furious majesty Overall delivers on this disc makes clear. So much contemporary hip-hop is predicated on studio-bound workmanship that it is stunning to hear similarly electrifying effects conjured by nothing but five musicians in a room together.
Given Overall’s principal instrument of choice, it should come as no surprise that percussive sounds are the engine of Live at Third Man. This kicks in right out of the gate, as the first track, the futurism-inflected “Find Me,” builds from the crackling interplay of Overall’s drums and the percussion accents of Bendji Allonce and multi-instrumentalist Tomoki Sanders. The keyboard of Ian Finkelstein and Sanders’ electronics waft and groan in the background, while the reverb-heavy trumpet of Theo Croker offers soothing drawn-out phrases. Amidst this enveloping spectrum, Overall’s voice here functions almost as much as an additional instrumental color, offering short, clipped exhortations of the titular phrase, echoed by synthesized double-tracked reiterations in his own voice. It feels like a quiet-storm boudoir dispatch from the twenty-fifth century, if future lovers were as turned on by soft-and-smooth effects as by booming snare-heavy beats.
That cool, caressing texture also suffuses “La Casa Azul,” with Croker at his smokiest and most insinuating. (The importance of the trumpet to this tune is unsurprising, as Overall co-composed with Croker’s late colleague Roy Hargrove.) But Overall’s lyrics come more prominently to the fore here, offering the thoughtful sentiment that “only a broken heart is an open heart,” a bittersweet assertion perfectly in harmony with the track’s hushed, mellow atmosphere. The vocalist is even more determined on the album-closing “Who’s On the Playlist,” on which, amidst the full furious attack of the assembled battery of percussionists, Overall holds forth: “I just gotta tell ‘em all / I was really born to ball…This is my time now.”
The new track “Bellyflop” is a potent reminder of Overall’s belief in the musicality of everything. The artist drives the beat with cracking stomach slaps and vocal grunts and gasps, while Sanders’ tenor saxophone and Finkelstein’s synths offer stalwart support to their leader’s entreaty that his listeners are “so close to home.” The sprawling scope of Overall’s musical conception is forcefully driven to that home by the album’s longest track, the eleven-minute-plus “I Know You See Me.” This cut builds from shimmering synth chords backed by Allonce’s cascading rain stick, to Overall jabbing like a prizefighter with verses alternately playful and profound (“I only feel right / When I write the way I feel”), to a titanic climactic percussive explosion, beats upon beats, driving the audience, audibly engaged and appreciative throughout, into a stirring ovation.
Among the most prominent popular music genres, hip-hop is the one most frequently accused by its detractors of “all sounding the same.” Kassa Overall Live at Third Man Records is a convincing corrective to that misinformed stance. It’s an album rich in many of the components hip-hop’s foes decry it for lacking: Virtuosic live instrumentation; versatility of vocalization; respect for related traditions from other genres of music; honesty intermingled with a genuine aura of warmth, conviviality, and fellow-feeling. I can’t necessarily guarantee that Overall’s work here would turn someone into a rap fan overnight. But it might at least provide them with the valuable intel that there is far more, in heaven and hip-hop, than is dreamt of in their philosophy.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
MAY 3, 1988
Today is the final day of a 10-day auction of personal effects and artifacts from the estate of Andy Warhol, who has passed away the previous February after surgery to remove a severely inflamed gallbladder. The auction, presented by Sotheby’s in New York City, comprises well over 10,000 total items, broken down into a fourteen-category retinue delineated in a slipcovered six-volume catalogue.
The unmarried, unattached Warhol, who has no immediate heirs, has left behind everything from plastic swap-meet kitsch and ostensibly value-free household goods (including dozens of cookie jars, one of the Pop artist’s many seemingly random collections) to beautifully detailed Native American tapestries and weavings; striking modern art works by the likes of David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jackson Pollock; and a number of Warhol’s own Pop art pieces, notably a 1962 paint-and-stencil canvas entitled “210 Coca-Cola Bottles.” Prior to the auction’s launch, the Sotheby’s evaluators have estimated the entire collection to be worth about $10 to $15 million. These figures are derived entirely from speculation about the items’ inherent market value, without taking into consideration the added cachet of the material having been owned by one of the most famous figures in all of contemporary art.
Over the week-and-a-half run of the auction, Sotheby’s New York space receives approximately 60,000 total visitors, eager for a glimpse at the valedictory artifacts of the one and only Andy Warhol. Bids on the auction’s 3,436 lots come in from across the country and as far away as Japan. Lucy Mitchell-Innes, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, notes the excitement in the auction house during active bidding, with sometimes up to 15 people making offers for the same piece at the same time. A number of the purchase prices for the fine art works shatter previously set auction sale records for the artists in question. Pollock’s “Search,” which is consigned by the successful bidder to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sells for $3.6 million, breaking Pollock’s previous sales record by almost a cool million bucks. Record-setting auction bids are also paid for pieces by Hockney, Kline, abstract expressionist Cy Twombly, and painter Richard Diebenkorn. Warhol’s own Coca-Cola piece sells to an anonymous buyer for $1.43 million, which itself sets a record at the time for a single-piece sale of a Warhol.
By the time the auction wraps up on the 3rd, only 78 of the offered lots have gone unsold. The final sales tally comes to exactly $25,313,328, representing what is then the largest single-auction sale since Sotheby’s opening in 1744. The proceeds of this sale, minus the auctioneers’ fee, will be allocated to the recently founded Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, a modern arts support and advancement organization launched to honor a final request in Warhol’s will. Fred Hughes, Warhol’s longtime business manager and estate executor, who has been named as the Foundation’s first president, professes the organization’s “delight” in the auction’s results, which, when added to the proceeds of the sales of Warhol’s real estate holdings and controlling interest in his magazine Interview, is expected to give the Foundation an initial operating capital of $40 million.
Over the decades following his death, the estimated cumulative value of Warhol’s personal estate fluctuates to as high as $600 million. Most current estimates place that value at present at approximately $220 million.
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