Along with Digable Planets and De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest was a part of the Native Tongues, a collective of hip hop groups that made music inspired by jazz with conscious lyrics, and one of the pioneers of what we can call “jazz rap”.
This song is a primarily example of their music, because it brings all the right elements of that movement - and also, of what we value in “Music to Dali & Jay-Z lovers”: the peaceful vibes, the jazzy sound (with a sample from Jimmy McGriff), the intriguing lyrics.
The whole “Low End Theory” album is superb; but we’ve chosen “Jazz (we’ve got)” for obvious reasons. It’s as literal as the song’s title suggests: they’re hip hop, they rap, but they’ve got the jazz too. Who thought, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, it would be possible? But “it's 1991 and I refuse to come wack”, so A Tribe Called Quest did it and did it masterly, combining the challenger nature of hip hop with the calmness of jazz, in a (yet) new approach, like they say themselves in this song: “The tranquility will make you unball your fist / For we put Hip Hop on a brand new twist”.
“Jazz (we’ve got)” delivers a sonic and lyrical experience that makes you want to “cool out to the music cause it makes you feel serene” (that’s such an amazing description, it could actually be used to describe any of the songs here in our playlist).
But, pay no mind, even though they were pretty confident about their awesomeness, they didn’t want to impose anything (“Don't deserve the gong, don't deserve the praise”).The goal there was never to use hate as motivation for their swag and their grind, but instead, to use their swag and their grind to spread peace.
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About the curator: Ana Clara Ribeiro
Music, art and entertainment have always played a big role in the life of Ana Clara Ribeiro. She grew up in Gurupi (an inland city in Tocantins, the youngest State of Brazil), listening to all kinds of music, reading, writing, watching stuff and connecting them to her personal beliefs and other ideas she read about.
As she became a lawyer and a writer, all the topics to which she is constantly exposed continued to give her insights about life, people and the universe, through the lenses of art.
Nowadays, when she isn’t analyzing lawsuits or producing content about Law, Marketing, Business or Music, she is certainly doing something related to her various personal and professional projects, always to the sound of a playlist as eclectic as her life.
