![]() It’s fitting that you worked with Blue Note for your first jazz album. With that in mind, the reason jazz was always so appealing is because it is so limitless. I wanted to make a jazz album, so I made it, though I don’t plan on making strictly jazz records. Jazz will probably influence whatever I’m doing in the future, but moreso, I see this album informing the themes or contexts I bring to whatever is next. If you listen to some of my earlier stuff, there are elements of me playing the saxophone and other jazz-related sounds. This album is very much a side quest for me. ![]() I wanted to be able to explore the convergence of those spaces without any unreasonable expectations.ĭo you envision yourself incorporating jazz in your future music? There are some songs on there that are very R&B, but there’s also stuff that’s very much in the jazz tradition. So many prototypical R&B dudes end up trying to make a jazz album. It was so much fun that I was “okay, I’m gonna make a jazz album.” I wanted to give some deeper meaning to it as well. I had just finished up doing music for Godfather of Harlem, where I recorded 15 straight-up jazz songs. I wanted to be able to explore the convergence of those spaces without any unreasonable expectations.”ĭid you specifically want to make a jazz project or did that end up happening organically? ![]() “There are some songs on there that are very R&B, but there’s also stuff that’s very much in the jazz tradition. Working with Blue Note on this helped me to step into a different direction, and I was excited to explore that path. It wouldn’t make much sense for my fans to just be like, “Oh, this is a new Cautious Clay album” because it sounds so different from anything I’ve ever done. I’m also presenting this as a jazz album. I used some early compositions I created when I was a kid too. For instance, I don’t usually do live drum recordings. I was recording KARPEH in a very different way. How did your approach to KARPEH differ from past projects like Deadpan Love or your earlier Table of Context and Blood Type EPs? You’ve been making music for nearly a decade now. I got some of my favorite musicians together to record the different pieces of instrumentation that I had prepped ahead of time. I usually record my music at my home studio, but I went into a live recording studio to finish everything. It was six days of recording, but also, obviously, several years of preparation. Listeners will probably be like, “what’s going on here?,” but with that, I was trying to mimic what it feels like to be on a psilocybin trip and have a bunch of different voices in your head talking to you as you’re going through it.Ĭan you walk me through the timeline of assembling the album? There’s like a skit called “Take a Half” on the album that is an amalgamation of my dad, my girlfriend and my aunt talking about all these different things. I would talk to them and then write about my own personal experiences and relationships and how those have developed over the years, and then reduce it down to something that felt like it captured the conversation. I talked with them about different situations that they were in, how they grew up and the house my dad was raised in. I did a ton of interviews with my family members. How did you go about transforming those conversations into compositions and lyrics? What did those talks with your family look like? Intertwining with that are my own relationships and conceptions of intimacy and ideas around solitude. I’m outlining how my grandparents affected my family, starting with my parents, and then how my parents shaped me. ![]() It’s a summation of my family’s cultural identity through the lens of both generations of grandparents. Thematically, a lot of the content of the album is focused on my life chronologically. What brought about these deep conversations? In conversation with HYPEBEAST, Clay reflected on his newfound embrace of jazz and the process of writing, composing and recording KARPEH.Ĭollaboration is so central to KARPEH, particularly your conversations with your parents, grandparents and girlfriend. It’s fitting a move, given that KARPEH happens to be his first release via the storied jazz label Blue Note Records. For the effort, Clay enlisted a fleet of jazz musicians, including his own uncle, bassist Kai Eckhardt, for vibrant instrumentations intertwining saxophone, soprano, guitar, synthesizer, and electric bass, the last of which he performs himself. The album also marks the typically R&B-leaning Clay’s first full foray into jazz, a genre he was inspired by on his 2021 debut Deadpan Love. ![]()
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