"Broken Beat to me, it 's a term I have never really got to
grips with. I don't do "broken beat", my beats are quite fixed
thank you!"
Excerpt from Colin
Lindo interview featured at Hyperdub
"That's something I've always tried to fight against, the notion
of West London and 'broken beats' and such. I think that when
people give us those sorts of labels they tend to make us look
a bit parochial. It just makes us look like we're a clique and
we're not really about that."
Excerpt from Modaji
interview featured at Dotmusic
So here we are poor sinners spraying terms like broken beat or
West London -and making heavy references to Ladbroke Grove- all
over our reviews while the very tenants of the supposed genre
just shrug off the etiquette as dumbfound pigeonholing, a filthy
habit cultivated by the press. For those already infatuated with
releases such as 4
Hero's Two
Pages or New
Sector Movements debut LP there might be no need for further
interference between the fan and the music for others the unapologetic
classification featured below might prove useful.
If there is no fixated broken-beat or West London genre as such,
one can roughly sketch up common characteristics of recent UK
productions courtesy of producers hailing most of the time from
a drum' n bass background : broken beats which means that instead
of a regular pattern, the beat is syncopated as in drum &
bass or as on breakbeat jazz, a strong funk and soul jazz influence
in almost all keyboard layers with most frequently recurring godfathers
being Roy
Ayers or Donald
Byrd, a culture of groove that is influenced as much by reggae
as it is by Fela
Kuti's Afrobeat
and finally a West London homebase.
1.The Drum & Bass deception : In the late nineties, as the drum
& bass scene became less and less innovative and ensconced
in its darkest forms, many producers looked into other genres
and formats to keep their production style evolving. One one side
this lead to two-step / uk garage and on the other to an experimental
research often meshing jazz influences with drum & bass rhythm
patterns. This is a common characteristic shared by many producers
across Europe ranging from nu-jazz stalwarts Jazzanova
to broken beat premiers Dego
McFarlane and Alex
Attias one of the pioneer of the hybrid with his landmark
Dark Jazzor
release. But then not all active West London musicians share a
drum & bassing past,
I.G. Culture was formerly a Hip Hop producer and anyway 4
Hero started as a Acid House quatuor which in the end could
equate West London with techno - a notion to which US counterparts
Chris
Brann and Carl
Craig might acquiesce.
2. Le groove. If I were to pick up a music weekly to find in
it a paper inept enough to assert that a genre that is afterall
rooted in half a century of black music has a strong groove element,
I would probably burst into laughter. However here the distinguo
seems quite acurate as the continental or for that matter Japanese
equivalents to broken beat -see Compost
and JCR
pages- seem in general rooted in either the precious abstract
side of jazz or the latin and Brazilian flavours while the soul
jazz connection remains the trademark, albeit not the unique one,
of producers such as I.G, Dego or Bugz
in the Attic. What's more, when compared to, say, two-step,
broken beat relies on a non-formatted type of groove often letting
it ride unbridled for the beauty of it at the expense of the familiar
verse /chorus /bridge/chorus anchor. It's not Motown,
it's more likely a new "Kalakuta Republic".
Finally if you acknowledge the techno influence - Nubian
Mindz, Nu
Era- you might as well rephrase the Derrick May quote : "Broken
Beat is Rhythm is Rhythm, Roy Ayers, Dilinja and Fela meeting
in an elevator". In short fusion music of all groove music.
3. The West London setting. Tempting as it is to picture cohorts
of producers gathered in Goyamusic's
basement pushing dope track after dope track as if they were acting
in an Intel advertising, this, shamefully, doesn't stand a serious
reality check. However, the genre in its early days owes much
to the -West London- Ladbroke Grove area and globally to London's
history of supporting innovative music. It is there that Alex
Attias relocated, that Enrico Volcov sojourned before and after
starting his own Archive
imprint. It is there that Radio-djs such as Giles
Peterson supported the fledgling scene, there that the first
co-op nights were set and finally there that a core drum & bass
public, former acid-jazz fans and rare-groove hardened co-existed,
precisely the kind of audience that could be receptive to the
new sound. Lastly, the presence of experienced producers or music
industry players must have favored the blossoming of an impressive
number of dedicated independent imprint : People,
Main
Squeeze, Bitasweet,
Visions,
Laws
of Motion, 2000
Black ...the way the sonar kollektiv fostered the German scene.
Now barely two-years old broken-beat doesn't seem to be willing
to stop its mutation and fusion frenzy. An essential release will
be issued soon, 4
Hero's follow up to Two Pages already heralded by Minnie
Riperton reprise Les
Fleur, tentatively the kind of LP that could convert more
headz to this otherwise underground artform.