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, nylon-string guitar and muted trumpet. The drums often move closer to a relaxed jazz or bossa nova feel than to a hard hip hop backbeat.
Its harmonic and melodic world comes largely from the cool jazz, modal jazz, bossa nova and lounge records of the 1950s and 1960s, filtered through the sample-based approach of producers such as Nujabes and J Dilla, whom lo-fi listeners credit with joining jazz melodies to boom-bap drums. Because it is instrumental, steady in energy and soft in volume, jazz lo-fi works well as background for writing, studying and cafés.