On CREAM, drummer, rapper and producer Kassa Overall brings together his two great loves: hip-hop and jazz drumming in the tradition of Elvin Jones. Where rap albums usually sample jazz, he reverses the approach, reworking rap hits from the 90s and 00s into instrumental jazz standards. Wu-Tang Clan’s C.R.E.A.M. becomes a spiritual waltz built on West African trance rhythms, Notorious B.I.G.’s Big Poppa a bossa nova, and Digable Planets’ Cool Like Dat is set in 15/4 time. After earlier albums full of drum machines, samples and Ableton Live, he recorded CREAM the way Rudy Van Gelder did Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme: together in one room, with no overdubs and no edits.

For more than twenty years, Overall has been connecting jazz, hip-hop and the avant-garde. He has toured and recorded with Geri Allen, Jon Batiste, Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer, Terri Lyne Carrington and Gary Bartz, and produced for Theo Croker, Arto Lindsay and Danny Brown. On his Warp debut ANIMALS (2023), he explored his identity as an artist and as a Black man in America, with guests including Lil B, Nick Hakim and Vijay Iyer.

‘One of modern jazz music’s most audacious futurists’ (Pitchfork).