How Kassa Overall Turned Rap Into New Jazz Standards

On his new album "CREAM," the drummer closes the gap between two cornerstone genres.

Jazz and rap have long been in conversation: a long, braided history of borrowed drum breaks, sampled horns, shared rhythms and socially-pointed lyricism. From the hard-bop cadences that undergirded some early rap loops, to the Blue Note and Verve records that producers mined for texture, the two genres have traded vocabulary for decades.

But that relationship is not just sonic; it’s genealogical and philosophical: jazz music’s openness to improvisation found a new democracy in rap’s collage. That mutuality — jazz as source, rap as commentary, both as sites of Black musical invention — is the terrain Kassa Overall stakes out on CREAM, a compact, bracing project that reimagines eight golden-era rap songs as live, improvisatory jazz statements. The album isn’t nostalgia; rather, it’s a conversation, a series of questions posed to canonized tracks, with the answers arriving in extended solos, subtle reharmonizations and the moment-to-moment risk of an ensemble listening to one another.

Kassa’s career is a hybrid itself. A drummer first, schooled in the discipline of jazz but fluent in studio production and contemporary songcraft, he’s moved through vast idioms without apology. He’s been a hired hand for jazz luminaries, a collaborator with electronic and rap artists, and the auteur of records that collapse the distance between drum-set logic and beat-making. That trajectory is important: where earlier projects felt like attempts to corral disparate impulses into a single grammar, CREAM sounds like the mature work of an artist choosing one radical constraint (no samples, no machines, no overdubs) and using it to magnify his habit of cross-pollination. The album, released September 12, reinvents certain classics, and the choice of material gestures toward Kassa’s central thesis: rap is now an American standard, and it deserves new contextualization.

Constraints are the album’s statement of faith. Where a producer can create whole worlds with a laptop, CREAM centers the gorgeous alchemy of people playing together. This is not a throwback to rigid “jazz purity.” Instead, Kassa uses the band format to highlight the impromptu nature of rap: the call-and-response of an MC and their audience, the cyclical groove of a beat, the layering of texture across repeated bars. On CREAM, a Notorious B.I.G. hook becomes a vamp for modal exploration; a Wu-Tang cipher dissolves into free-time exchanges. The album makes a persuasive claim that the best way to honor rap’s legacy is not to copy its surface, but to translate its nuances into something greater.

Kassa’s previous records — from the live-meets-studio amalgam of Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz to the sprawling collages of Animals — have tracked an artist testing form and temperament. Animals spread outward: guests, electronics, and a thematic ambition that asked uncomfortable questions about humanity, performance and social systems. CREAM tightens the aperture. Where Animals was a terrain of many voices (Nick Hakim, Danny Brown, Laura Mvula and Vijay Iyer, among many others), CREAM is a focused dialectic between jazz’s communal listening and rap’s melodic memory. For listeners who admired Kassa’s appetite for fusion, CREAM shows how restraint can function as a new kind of experimentation.

The record opens, tellingly, with Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance,” a reminder that jazz itself can soothe and revolt. The band’s reading is lithe and taut: the melody is familiar but recast through a contemporary blend that suggests the horn players are both honoring a lineage and testing its elasticity. From there, CREAM moves through an unapologetically canonical list: Biggie’s “Big Poppa,” Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.,” A Tribe Called Quest’s “Check the Rhime,” OutKast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” Digable Planets’ “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”, Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin But a ‘G’ Thang” and Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up.” Those songs are rote fixtures in hip-hop culture — not just because of their hooks but for the social worlds they encoded — and Kassa treats them as living organisms rather than museum pieces. The arrangements resist mere novelty; they’re less about clever rewrites and more about re-listening.

Take “Big Poppa.” On wax, the Notorious B.I.G. song is velvet and swagger, a late-night poem. Kassa’s band unspools the motif and then suspends it, elongating the spaces between phrases, letting the rhythm section drift into cross-currents, and allowing the saxophone to bloom like an after-hours solo in a smoky club. The soloing isn’t a spectacle, but an act of translation. The band keeps the groove recognizable enough to anchor the memory but open enough to allow new flourishes. There’s a risk that the tune might lose its identity, but Kassa avoids that trap by honoring the original’s mood before dismantling it. The result reads like a respectful reading of a beloved song, not a parody.

“C.R.E.A.M.” is more radical. The Wu-Tang classic, with its austere piano motif and moral fatalism, becomes a study in tension. Kassa’s adaptation keeps the original’s harmonic scaffolding but splinters the rhythm into polyrhythmic fragments. Instead of the record’s steady, ominous pulse, the band plays with displacement: cymbal patterns that float, bass lines that tug against the meter, horns that answer the piano with fractured phrases. It’s both homage and critique: Kassa radiates the song’s historic sting, widening the space so players can interrogate the emotional subtext. Where the original felt like reportage from the curb, this version feels like a group therapy session for the original’s prevailing anxiety.

There’s a formal elegance to the project as well. Kassa and his band aren’t simply transcribing rap melodies into horn charts; they’re asking how melodic language can shift a song’s meaning. A Tribe Called Quest’s laid-back, jazz-inflected flow is turned back on itself, its syncopation exaggerated and turned into a series of modal excursions. OutKast’s elasticity is matched by textural surprises: whispered horn lines, sudden shifts into waltz-time, moments where silence functions as punctuation. In this way CREAM is pedagogical, revealing the rhythmic sophistication already present in these rap tracks and then pushes them further. The album’s approach is not academic display, but a demonstration of how much there is to discover when two lineages — jazz improvisation and rap’s looped motifs — are made to listen to each other again. It’s one thing to hear “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” at a barbecue and smile; it’s another to hear it stripped and reassembled as a piece that contains both celebration and historical weight.

Kassa’s drumming anchors these interpretations with both subtlety and force. He’s a percussionist who knows when to lay down a statement and when to cede space. He’s also the translator who can hear the cadence of an MC inside a horn riff. On CREAM, his touch is elastic: sometimes he’s a metronomic pulse, sometimes he’s an atmosphere maker, and sometimes his fills reframe a bar. This elasticity is crucial because the album’s success depends on authority in the pocket as much as daring in the solo.

Artistically, CREAM is also a statement about medium. In an era when the historical relationship between jazz and rap is often framed through sampling archives and crate-digging, Kassa’s insistence on live reinterpretation is radical. And there are moments where the concept flirts with predictability. Fans of the originals may wish for fewer detours. But those are quibbles against an album that’s both generous and exacting. Kassa knows how to let a tune breathe; he also knows how to pull it apart. CREAM asks for deep dissection, not to reveal gimmicks but to make the listener witness the slow accretion of meaning across the ensemble’s choices.

At the end of the album, it’s clear that Kassa has made a claim not just about these songs but about the cultural work of reinterpretation. Jazz has always repurposed the present into something malleable; rap has always turned memory into future. CREAM does both simultaneously. It’s an LP that listens as much as it speaks, that honors lineage while insisting on remaining in the present. For Kassa, this is not retro curiosity; to me, it feels like the continuation of a lineage in which the past is engaged, argued with, and made to bloom again.

If anything about the album feels definitive, it’s in how it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. That alchemy is Kassa’s gift here. He asks us to reconsider what counts as standard repertoire, to accept that a rap song can be as worthy of repeated, improvisatory scrutiny as a Thelonious Monk tune. In doing so, he expands the canon, honors the lineage and stakes a claim for future experiments. CREAM isn’t simply a covers album, it’s a manifesto: jazz and rap are engaged in an ongoing dialogue, and Kassa Overall is one of our most eloquent orators.