Jazz Ain’t Dead: Hard Proof
Attention readers: This week I’ll be taking a break from music that can strictly qualified as jazz for a venture into some new territory: the endlessly-grooving funk music of Austin, Texas band Hard Proof.
This 9 piece out of the Texas capital city plays a fascinating musical fusion referred to as Afrobeat. This mixture of jazz, funk, and indigenous African music was founded by Nigerian musical-revolutionary Fela Kuti, who used his sound to respond to the repression of the Nigerian government imposed on him and his community. Unlike Kuti, Hard Proof themselves have little to no political agenda to their music; however, they manage to take the best musical aspects of Afrobeat and twist them to form their own fascinating music that is amazingly funky, virtuosic, and danceable at once.
Hard Proof’s sound takes the foundation of Afrobeat, a polyrhythmic rhythm section with short, repetitive melodic patterns that set the stage for kicking, punctual horn lines that will get any eager body moving in a hurry, and fuse them with elements of psychedelic rock and fusion music. The song “Trickle Down” best embodies their sound. In it a standard Afrobeats groove and horn line are laid down, only to be followed by an overdriven guitar solo that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Jimi Hendrix album. The song seems to come to a sudden stop only to be closed out with a roaring b section featuring the whole horn line driving home the tune in screaming unison. If this music doesn’t get you moving, I don’t know what will.
Here’s a select few songs by Hard Proof that I think any rhythm hungry individual can enjoy:
Hard Proof [Spotify Playlist]
