hard bop
Hard bop emerged in the mid-1950s as an extension of bebop rooted in Black gospel, blues and rhythm and blues. Compared with bebop it often favoured medium tempos, simpler and more singable themes, gospel-tinged piano chords and harder, more expressive saxophone tones. It was also partly a reaction to the more European-leaning polish of cool […]
instrumental hip hop
Instrumental hip hop treats the beat as the main event rather than a backing for an MC. Producers arrange drums, samples, bass lines and sometimes scratching into tracks meant to be heard on their own, mostly released by small independent labels. Because so much of it relies on samples, the genre has always been shaped […]
J Dilla
J Dilla, also known as Jay Dee, was the professional name of James Dewitt Yancey, born in Detroit on 7 February 1974. He made his name with the group Slum Village and as a producer for artists including A Tribe Called Quest, Common and Erykah Badu, becoming one of the most respected beatmakers in hip […]
jazz lo-fi
Jazz lo-fi is the name Mondolofi uses for the jazz-leaning branch of lo-fi. It keeps the essentials of lo-fi hip hop, such as short looping forms, gentle tempos and a deliberately warm, slightly worn sound, but gives more space to the vocabulary of jazz: extended chords on electric piano, walking double bass, brushed snare, vibraphone, […]
jazz standard
A jazz standard is a composition so widely known that jazz musicians can play it together with little or no rehearsal, and that listeners recognise across countless versions. There is no official list and the repertoire shifts over time, but fake books and reference works give a good picture of its core. Many standards began […]
jazzhop
Jazzhop, also written jazz hop or jazz-hop, describes hip hop beats whose harmony and colour come straight from jazz: seventh and ninth chords on piano or Rhodes, phrases on muted trumpet or saxophone, round double-bass lines, all laid over a steady hip hop groove. It is mostly instrumental and overlaps heavily with lo-fi hip hop […]
library music
Library music, also called production music, is recorded in advance and offered to broadcasters and film-makers through a catalogue, so that a producer can license a cue for a documentary, advert or news programme instead of commissioning a score or licensing a hit record. Albums were organised by mood or use, and composers often wrote […]
lo-fi
Lo-fi, a contraction of low fidelity, began as the opposite of hi-fi: a description of recordings that sounded cheap, noisy or home-made. Over time the imperfections themselves became something listeners valued. The musicologist Adam Harper, in a 2014 doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford, describes lo-fi as an aesthetic built on a positive appreciation […]
lo-fi aesthetic
Lo-fi is as much a visual and emotional atmosphere as a sound. Its best-known image is a short animated loop in a Japanese anime style: a character studying or daydreaming at a desk, a window with rain or city lights, a lamp, headphones, perhaps a cat or a cup of tea. The loop runs for […]
lo-fi hip hop
Lo-fi hip hop is a relaxed, mostly instrumental offshoot of hip hop. A typical track loops a few jazz or soul chords, taken from a sample or played on a Rhodes-style keyboard, over slow and loosely played drums, then dulls the sound with filtering, tape saturation and vinyl crackle. Tracks are short, rarely build to […]