What is Viral Jazz?
Here is a litmus test for anyone looking to gauge their exposure to viral jazz. What's your favorite dance move from the "I'm Tight" video by Louis Cole? Perhaps you're partial to the simplicity of the "RIDLEY SCOTTZ," or its more kinetic variation, the "STEPPIN' RIDLEYZ." Or maybe you're more of a conceptual "HEIMLICHZ" type. Now, if your answer to the prompt is "What the hell are you talking about?" — then congratulations, you don't appear to have been seriously exposed. But that doesn't mean you're immune.
Cole is a stupefyingly proficient multi-instrumentalist, singer, producer and trickster whose bracing new album, Quality over Opinion, releases this Friday on Brainfeeder. He's been a major player in the musical online attention economy for the better part of a decade, as a solo act and as one-half of Knower, with singer-songwriter and producer Genevieve Artadi. Together with virtuoso oddballs like MonoNeon, an electric bass whiz and vocal funkateer, and DOMi & JD Beck, a sly keys-and-drums duo repping mayhem in the rhythm matrix, Cole stands at the center of a cohort whose identifying traits are easy to recognize and harder to define. Many of these musicians have at least a tangential connection to Thundercat, the bassist and falsetto warbler whose interstellar jazz-R&B has been a defining Brainfeeder trademark. Like him, they're known for jaw-dropping technical ability, jazz-inflected genre fluidity and an irreverent yet allusive savvy regarding image and platform. At this disorienting moment in our age of digital exchange, they can sometimes seem like the only ones who've gleefully cracked the code.
