고마워요, 아마드!

Evolution always happens in unexpected directions. In that sense, Samokiyota’s [고마워요, 아마드!] is the result of hip-hop DJs evolving in a completely different direction than people expected. This is because the techniques used by DJs to control the atmosphere of a place by playing a playlist were shown to approach the realm of performance in Samo Kiyota’s work. At the same time, I think [고마워요, 아마드!], which unravels the relationship between jazz and hip-hop through production, is a work that both jazz and hip-hop fans must listen to at least once.

Richard Dawkins argues for the concept of a meme in his book The Selfish Gene. To put it simply, it is easy to understand that culture, like genes, is copied by removing a part of itself and changes through mutation. Memes cannot explain everything about cultural change, but the change of music genres has unfolded as Richard Dawkins claims. For example, break beats were created by cutting up the drum break section of funk and playing it repeatedly. Rap evolved from the MC’s chuimsae at breakbeat parties to modern times, and funk, the root of breakbeat and hip hop, originated in jazz.

The development of jazz has been centered around a technique called improvisation. It is a piece of music that is developed in such a way that each performer appropriately transforms a given theme in the field, and based on this, a new theme is developed, and the developed theme is transformed again to create another mood. Ahmad Jamal is an indispensable figure in the history of jazz. He made a huge impact on the jazz world in the 1950s and 1960s based on his minimalist playing. His playing influenced performers such as Miles Davis and contributed greatly to the impromptu and passionate reaction of bebop and the creation of cool jazz. Several artists, including Nas, sampled his work and also influenced hip-hop.

Meanwhile, in the visual arts world of the 1960s, minimalist art emerged amidst modernist art. Norms were important in modernist visual art. For example, a painting had to stand on its own without referring to something else. And since flatness was considered the most fundamental characteristic of painting, artists had to explore flatness.

However, minimalist art destroys the norms of modernist visual art. Viewers viewing the work of Robert Morris, a representative minimalist sculptor, had to move around the work to appreciate it. This is because the size of the work was awkward. This also means that the appearance of a work of art changes depending on the location, movement path, and time of viewing the work.

Furthermore, the aspect was further strengthened by using a simple form of sculpture that eliminated most of the artist’s intentions. From the perspective of modernism, this happened because elements that could refer to something else were excluded one by one according to the norm that a work should refer to itself and not something else, and in the end, the artist’s intention brought in something of the purest form that could not enter.

In addition, the audience during the modernism period was considered to have nothing other than the eyes to appreciate the work as the artist intended, and other elements of the audience did not have a significant influence on the appreciation of the work. However, it was different in minimalist art. Thanks to the above attempts, the audience was given a body, and the artist’s intention was excluded. In other words, the importance of the audience in the appreciation process has increased.

Now let’s go back to the 1970s, when hip-hop was born. Since people who came to the party danced most excitedly to the drum break, the breakbeat was born from the idea of ​​playing this song over and over again. From a certain point of view, a piece of music is a collection of elements that repeat or transform a theme as intended by the composer. And during the sampling process, the DJ listens to the music and cuts out everything else, leaving only the most danceable parts. In other words, breakbeat was a genre that cut out most of the context created by the artist in the beginning and left only one intention: ‘to make people dance.’ And this was done by the appreciator, the DJ, and by extension, the guests who came to the party.

Let’s summarize what we’ve seen so far. Jazz was a genre designed according to the interpretation and intention of the author, such as performer or composer. However, hip hop began as a viewer-centered art that removed the artist’s intention as much as possible and left only one form. Minimalist visual art finally gave the audience, who was just a ghost with floating eyes, a body, and strengthened the audience’s role in the process of appreciating the work. Therefore, hip hop can be seen as a child born from cutting off the stomach of its mother jazz with a scalpel like minimalism, which stabbed and killed the visual art norms of modernism.

We often think of the two genres, which were originally one body, as something completely separate. However, as we saw earlier, jazz and hip hop are inseparable. In that sense, Samo Kiyota’s [고마워요, 아마드!] can be said to be an album in which a child and a mother come face to face in one album. Consisting of 2 CDs and 24 tracks, this work clearly deals with the relationship between jazz and hip-hop in terms of production.

Disc 1 is about improvisation, and Disc 2 is about jazz music, focusing on sample playing, revealing the link between the two genres. By playing samples as if playing, it seems to deny the proposition, “Is sampling simply a technique born from the commercial intention of riding on the back of the original song?” This is because the song is carried out on an equal footing with the performer, but sampling sufficiently respects the performer’s space and interplay occurs. This part shows how much respect DJ Samo Kiyota has for the genre of jazz and the performers who embody it while taking the helm of the entire album.

If a metaphor for the relationship between jazz and hip-hop was seen in the album production, Samo Kiyota’s personal thoughts on this can be observed in the book produced along with the album. Disc 1 tells the story of Ahn and Yul, and Disc 2 tells the story of Yotaro Kimiko and Jeong through music. The story of Yotaro Kimiko and Yul, described in the book as a mother-son relationship, continues in the latter part of the story, and the complex intertwining of jazz, hip-hop, artists who live in music, and Samo Kiyota’s personal attitude towards them gives a deep flavor.

In addition, the lineup of veteran players including Lee Seong-chan on bass, Lim Chang-hyun on drums, Cho Young-jae on keyboard, Bae Seon-yong on trumpet, FRETE on violin, Gyu-jae Lee on flute and timbales, EWI on saxophone, and Reiji Kumar on vocoder added depth to the song.

Samo Kiyota’s [고마워요, 아마드!] is an album that compiles the huge keywords of hip-hop and jazz that have had a great influence on modern popular music, while also redefining the position of DJ in the black music scene. In addition, it is the result of an experiment to show a new kind of music by tightly intertwining the two, rather than simply adding jazz and hip-hop. If you want to see how far the combination of jazz and hip-hop has progressed, be sure to watch Samo Kiyota’s [고마워요, 아마드!].