Organic engineering
Jazzanova leads the future of fusion.

By Peter Nicholson

'OH GOD! Not that wanky stuff!?" groaned an oh-so-hip music writer. "The only people who dig it are a bunch of dusty record collectors. It's just so ... nerdy!" A self-confessed Sunday-morning-at-the-Endup-after-two-Es type of girl, she can't stand the blend of instrumental jazz, Brazilian rhythms, and beefed-up beats that has been steadily rocking my stereo for a definitely un-hip length of time.

"It's fucking Return of Acid Jazz, Part 20!" Oooowee – she'd done it. Dropped the ultimate dis by referencing the tag that had launched a hundred compilations, raised crossover marketing hopes, and seemingly sank a vibrant scene all in the space of a few years. I decided to go out on a limb: "Besides the name and all the goatees, what was so bad about acid jazz?" I asked. "The cottage cheese that passes for your memory may not be able to creep back an entire decade, but I distinctly remember you swooning to no less than Galliano's 'Prince of Peace.' Sure it blew up, but the actual music was 10 times better than the crap they play at Mr. Floppy's or Toon Town or whatever drug bazaar was pulling them in. Same story here: calling something "nu jazz" makes me cringe, but whatever the tag, there's loads of brilliant tunes, even real songs and actual albums that I can listen to over and over and hear new inventive shit!"

"Yawn. 'Inventive ... brilliant tunes.' Sounds like it's ready for NPR. But is it going to move my ass enough to freak that sweaty cutie over by the bar?"

"I dunno. Looks like you'd need some seriously heavy equipment to move that ass – Oww!"

Having decided to put the "future-nu jazz fusion" beast to the, uh, acid test, I ventured out that night to Phusion at 26 Mix. As I limped my way down Mission Street, I chewed on the bits of her argument that might last longer than the bruises (endless mornings at the Endup definitely give a girl one hell of a kick). Despite their near universal critical acclaim, even a future fusion heavyweight like Jazzanova is rarely heard on the main floor of the big clubs, being consigned to often inaccurately named downtempo side rooms or smaller nights where one might be able to actually hold a conversation over the thump of the bass. I myself heard it most often in living rooms as background music for low-key parties and soundtracks for many lazy evenings at home. In fact, this summer's bumper crop of full-length albums from Jazzanova, Koop, and Nuspirit Helsinki are in permanent rotation in my CD player, each telling a different story of the intersection between live jazz instrumentation, sampling, and engineering while compelling me to just feel the music. So I braved the Saturday night crowds of casual clubbers to check out a set from Nuspirit Helsinki's DJ Ender – he had come out all the way from Finland, after all.

With its modest scale, above-average sound quality, and relative lack of egregious attitude, 26 Mix is one of my favorite spots. It's still a dance club, though, and Ender was giving the people what they wanted. Having had their pumps primed by the wide-ranging yet focused tastes of Phusion copromoter and Ubiquity Records V.P. Andrew Jervis, an enthusiastic mélange of club crawlers, weekend warriors, and sweaty sweethearts were working it all over the floor to an infectiously funky mix of soulful vocals and brash bleeps riding constantly shifting Latin rhythms. People were dancing and drinking and chasing a bit of tail, not lining the walls, stroking their goatees, and talking about their latest rare groove discovery. The closest thing to trainspotters I could find were a pair of boys next to the turntables stoically displaying the fruits of memberships at Muscle Systems, and even they started to get loose after I bought the cute one a drink.

A few hours later on the drive home (having avoided any misunderstanding through judicious display of my wedding ring) I was grooving to the studio side of DJ Ender as featured on Nuspirit Helsinki's eponymous recent release from Guidance Recordings. Though there are several songs that would have fit perfectly into Ender's uptempo set, such as the thick, 2-stepped funk of "Trying" and the building flügelhorn-and-trumpet shuffle of "Skydive," the overall agenda is obviously different. Fellow founding member (N.H.'s press shot shows a smiling crew 15-strong) Tuomas Kallio explained that he's disappointed with albums that are mere collections of 12-inches: "CDs for me are to be handled as a whole; they are for real music, a format for songs instead of tracks."

When Kallio speaks of real music, he's not just talking feeling but also execution. The lush strings that color the album's considerable emotion are courtesy of four violins, two violas, and two cellos, and much of the actual recording was done in rooms specifically suited for the band's sound and with equipment like an old tube Neumann '67 mic with a tube preamp and analog tape recorders – "For that sound, you know," he said. While computer-aided recording definitely plays a role in N.H.'s production, Kallio sees it as just part of the process. "These days there's not much totally new to explore in production purely based on samples and programming," he said. "The next level for us is to find fresh ways of combining electronic elements with live instrumentation." As I pull into my driveway, I find myself wishing the burdens of commercial success on N.H., just so they can bring over their electronic big band for a few live dates.

The next morning I started the day off smooth with a dose of N.H. contemporaries Koop. Their debut album, Waltz for Koop, has been rereleased by Palm Records after having enjoyed import success via future-fusion stalwart Jazzanova Compost Records and is currently climbing college charts. A perfect lazy-morning record, it's easy to feel electronica's empty space filled in by songs like the title track, with its loping, woody double bass, gentle keys, and breathy vocals. A glass of fresh O.J. is the ideal accompaniment – plus it nicely complements the ridiculous orange shirt-dresses the duo, Oscar Simonsson and Magnus Zingmark, are sporting on the cover. "Waltz for Koop" is about as far from the dance floor as it gets, but as the album runs and the tempos rise, the roots become clearer, until the restrained uptempo of "Relaxin' at Club F****n" seems like both a natural progression and a perfect floor-filler. In between we're treated to an exercise in the beauty of restraint courtesy of minimally arranged flutes, bongos, and vibes. This controlled aesthetic was alluded to when I asked Simonsson and Zingmark about musicians they admired. While Simonsson glibly replied that he "admired music, not musicians," Zingmark more tellingly said that he respected "any skillful musician who puts soul before technique and who doesn't play when he's got nothing to say."

A similar appreciation for subtlety is abundantly evident in the early work of John Beltran, one of the stateside alchemists of live instrumentation and heavy studio technology. Beltran's first project came out 11 years ago on Carl Craig's Retroactive Records, and he recorded subsequent albums for notable techno labels like Belgium's R&S and Derrick May's Transmat. His relocation from Detroit to Florida coincided with his growing interest in using live musicians to create organic-feeling dance music, and toward that end he hooked up with Ubiquity. While the German encampment of Jazzanova Compost Records has, alongside cross-pollinating partners in West London's broken-beat scene, garnered the bulk of future-jazz media attention, here at home Ubiquity has been holding things down nicely with its outstanding New Latinaires and No Categories compilations. Due out this fall, Beltran's Sun Gypsy looks set to kick up the flavor with its thick and spicy blend of Brazilian and Latin rhythms rubbing up against serious dancefloor production.

It's now midday, Indian summer is on its way, and Sun Gypsy is on repeat. With my mind drifting hazily, I soak up the rays on my deck and am reminded of music's magical ability to transport. The swelling layers of cowbells, conch, and bossa nova bass from "Kiana" wash over me, and I can almost smell Buenos Aires. And as the more urgently manipulated rhythms of "Dashiki" build through filtered loops to a frantic piano-and-bass break, I feel like I could be on a dance floor in Munich or Kyoto. But my doorbell rings, the baby starts crying, and I am back by the bay, looking for another record to expand the mind of my basement-musician friend who has just dropped in. Ross likes a bit of everything, and the first thing at hand is Jazzanova's recent album, In Between (JCR/Rope-a-Dope.)

My buddy doesn't really follow the same music as I do, but he's definitely heard of Jazzanova. Looming large over future jazz, the Berlin-based collective of six producers and DJs has lent its remix talents to seemingly everyone short of Britney Spears, with a double-CD's worth pulled together for last year's worldwide success The Remixes, 1997-2000. While that compilation was remarkable for the crew's ability to make 20 songs from other artists entirely their own (and great, danceable ones at that), In Between is totally different. Ross commented that it sounds much more stylistically diverse than Remixes and wondered how one band could come up with tracks as different as the hip-hop bounce of "The One-Tet," featuring Capital A, and the spaced-out broken soul of "Mwela, Mwela," featuring Valerie Etienne and Rob Gallagher.

Jazzanova's Jurgen von Knoblach credits the dissimilarities to the freedom provided by the album format as opposed to dance floor-dedicated 12-inches and tellingly put it in DJ terms, via e-mail while on tour in Japan: "When we think [of] doing a 12" we think about a special moment in a set [but] when we think about an album we have the whole set in mind." In fact, the DJ-centric focus of hip-hop is probably more central to Jazzanova than any jazz aesthetic. Seeing themselves as "jazz hooligans, if anything," the group's members use the hip-hop ethos of appropriation and collage as the unifying thread of In Between. It runs from the large scale, as on the opening song built from constantly shifting two-bar samples, to the minuscule, like as the drum solo from "Another New Day," which was made up of sampled, individual drum hits from legends such as Grady Tate.

But the jazz is still there, whether in the mastery of vibes by David Friedman or vocals from Charles Mingus's cohort Doug Hammond. The most jazz-sounding track is "Hanazono," a powerful piano workout with a distinctly Asian flavor. That was reinforced by Japanese soloist Hajime Yoshizawa, but it was certainly not a one-take, jammin'-in-the-club effort. The initial ideas of 5/4 time and Asian influences were sketched out in Berlin before Yoshizawa returned to Japan. There he recorded some final versions of his solo and sent them back to Jazzanova, who took it all apart again before building the song into a swinging tower of hammering harmonics, keys and koto. As von Knoblach pointed out, "We come from the DJ side and we like to present with records and turntables. We think more about a very special DJ set, as spontaneous as an improvisation, with the tension of very different styles of music."

Every time I come to "Hanazono," I stop what I'm doing, hit repeat, and just listen. Today's no different, and I stop grilling Ross about when he's going to return the last CDs he borrowed and sit there with a big, silly grin on my face as a look of wonder comes over him. Precise, powerful, and above all moving, "Hanazono" is the rare song that sounds utterly modern yet timeless. Yet it's just one high point of an album that manages to explore many houses while using skillful programming to keep the listener in the same wonderful neighborhood. Ross already knows the answer, but he tries anyway. "Hell no, you can't borrow it! These guys deserve your dollars, fool."

Jazzanova play Mon/23, 6 p.m., Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, S.F. Free. (415) 831-2100; and with Koop, DJ Fluid, and Tom Thump, 8 p.m--2 a.m., Ruby Skye, 420 Mason, S.F. $15. (415) 693-0777.