Excuse Me, Sir, You Have Some Jazz In Your Metal

Jazzy metal is all the rage, and NPR has a take on it.

Earlier today, NPR Music published one of my pieces for Take Five, our weekly jazz feature, called Blast Beat Improv: Metallic Free Jazz. I’ve come to subtitle it “Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Bill Laswell“; the beret-ed bassist and producer is worth his own essay (seriously), in part because he spearheaded a lot of metal-influenced free jazz. (Aka grind-jazz, acoustic grind, death jazz or free death.) It’s not swing for the faint of heart.

On the flip side, jazz (free and otherwise) has had a large influence on metal. Often, musicians with jazz backgrounds start thrash and death metal bands, using their knowledge of chord progressions and polyrhythms to inform brutal compositions.