Kassa Overall is a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer,
producer and drummer who melds avant-garde experimentation
with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and
ra p i n unm ap ped di rect io ns. He previ ou sly rele ase d f o ur
critically acclaimed projects: I THINK I’M GOOD, Go Get Ice
Cream and Listen to Jazz, Shades of Flu and Shades of Flu 2.
O n ANIMALS, h i s W a rp R e co rd s d e b u t, K a s s a pu s he s h i s
kaleidoscopic, subversive vision further. He layers Roland 808s
against avant-garde drumming in the vein of his mentors Elvin
Jones and Billy Hart, the latter of whom he studied with at the
Oberlin C o n s e r v a t o r y o f M u s i c . V i r t u o s o m u s o s a p p e a r
alongside rap poets, including Danny Brown, Wiki, Lil B, and
Shabazz Palaces. Top-fight jazz improvisation weaves in and
out of orchestral string arrangements by Jherek Bischof. The
album’s diverse, all-star roster of collaborators includes several
of his close friends, like vocalists Nick Hakim, Laura Mvula,
Francis and the Lights, and jazz stars like Theo Croker and Vijay
Iyer.
ANIMALS pushes Kassa’s message further too, the title a
loaded metaphor for the paradoxes of his life as an entertainer
and as a black man in America. ANIMALS is the sound of an
artist aware of the cost of embodying one’s natural self in the
public eye, a deep reckoning with the two-sided truth that to
perform one’s freedom for an audience can mean succumbing
to life inside a cage.