It was Gangstarr’s Guru who, on the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, rapped, “The Nineties will be something of a jazz thing.” The New York City duo did more to publicize the inherent similarities between jazz and hip-hop than anyone had done prior. Q-Tip followed a year later, with A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory: “Back in the days when I was a teenager, before I had status and before I had a pager, you could find the abstract listening to hip-hop. My pops used to say it reminded him of be-bop.”
The marriage of the two grew significantly tighter in 1999, when Geoff “Double G” Gallegos put together the DaKAH Symphonic Hip Hop Orchestra, a Los Angeles-based orchestra putting hip-hop in the hands of classical arrangements. Gallegos, who studied jazz saxophone performance at Berklee College of Music in Boston and has been a staple in schools and nightclubs across Southern California for the past 15 years, runs the operation from the ground up, arranging all the music and conducting throughout.
He made time for a run-down with Check Yo’ Self as the 63-person ensemble gets set to pack the Antone’s stage tonight.
Check Yo’ Self: DaKAH’s music sounds more like Glenn Miller than the classical depiction of an orchestra.
Geoff Gallegos: Yeah, I mean, however you want to define it is up to you. I’m more jazz-trained. I’ve had classical training as well, but I like those seventh chords and ninth chords that Haydn did.
CYS: We’ve seen live hip-hop with the Roots and other bands. We’ve seen Jay-Z perform with larger ensembles. But I’ve never come across anything as big as what you guys are doing. Take us back to the beginning.
GG: When this whole thing started, it was 23 Los Angeles musicians. We were all kind of bored and broke at the same time. Everyone agreed to come together for two shows and go from there. The first show was more successful than any of us thought it would be, and the second show was very successful. So everyone agreed to a third show. On that show all these musicians showed up and the news showed up, and it all took off very quickly. It was a very foreign concept, having a large ensemble playing beats. In 1999, that was something that I hadn’t seen before. To be honest, a lot of what inspired DaKAH was this movie called Red Hot and Cold. Have you seen it?
CYS: Man, I haven’t seen much of anything.
GG: It was a movie that came out in the early Nineties. They were pairing up jazz musicians with MCs and I was really inspired by that. Then Meshell Ndegeocello’s Plantation Lullabies came out in 1993. And then Groove Collective came out with their [self-titled] record, and I thought, “Oh, Groove Collective is on their way to becoming a hip-hop big band.” I thought the Roots might have done that in the mid-Nineties, but that never happened.
It never happened, and I wanted to hear it. So I was like, “Well, I can write music.” So I did it. Me and some friends got together and made it happen.
CYS: And since everyone was broke and out of work it just kind of …
GG: I think that was a big part of it. Myself and a trombonist named Dan Osterman were kind of the catalysts behind everything. We wrote the arrangements and got on the phone, spent a lot of time pulling people together. Then a lot of musicians would show up at our shows and wanted to play, so the orchestra just kind of grew from there.
CYS: How many players would you say have a solid understanding of hip-hop?
GG: We all come from completely different areas of musical influence. I’d say about half of the band has a good, deep collection of hip-hop, as far as records go. They go to the clubs and check out shows. With the younger cats in the group, they all grew up with hip-hop, so it’s not a shocker. It was just around. I’d actually, to go along with what Quincy Jones said, I’d say that in 2009 hip-hop is the most classically indigenous form of music that we have. It’s South Bronx folk music and it spread all over the whole world.
CYS: Walk us through the process of writing an album for an orchestra.
GG: For Unfinished Symphony, that was like taking rhythms from North America and South America and organizing them into classical forms. The way that the piece is organized, if you took the style away from it and counted bars, it’s kind of organized like a classical symphony. But take the rhythmic content and the harmonic content and it doesn’t sound like classical music anymore. The classical influence comes more with the structure of it and the way that certain themes will come in and out, back and forth. The beats came from hip-hop and the form came from classical. I chart it all. There are some musicians in the band who don’t even read music. I’ll chart it out and teach it to the musicians by ear. What I love about musicians who don’t read is that they remember stuff a lot longer than I do. Once cats learn something – there’s one cat I’m thinking of in particular – once they learn something, they just don’t forget it. It’s like a hard drive that’s wired into his brain. He’ll have a song that we haven’t played in ten years and he still knows everything. I’m having trouble remembering what key it’s in.
CYS: What else are you involved in?
GG: I’m involved in a lot of things. In 2008, I was heavily involved in a string quartet. I write string quartet music, which I love. And then I have a jazz group, called Concert 9Net, where I play saxophone. It’s like if you were on Bourbon Street and had seven cocktails in your head and then heard a brass band playing Stravinsky music. That’s what we play: Classical melodies, somewhat re-harmonized so they have more of a dissonant and jazz texture, and all with horns.
CYS: I’d imagine DaKAH would take up so much of your time.
GG: Well thank god for Finale, man. I wrote 17 pieces in the last five weeks for this tour, and that’s something that I couldn’t have done five years ago. Unfinished Symphony, which I wrote all out in hand, took about two straight months of time just drawing dots.
I wrote it while I was on tour with another band, and my MO that whole tour was to take all my pens and charts and everything and go to a coffee shop and draw dots for eight hours. Then I’d try to make it back for sound check.
CYS: Is it a learning process for the rappers to blend with the group?
GG: I worked at a different angle than normal on this tour. I took verses that they had already written to other beats, took their existing verse structure, and wrote new music around it. So they didn’t have to change anything.
But there are some songs where I’ll create space for them and let them know what I was thinking about when I wrote it. That’ll stand as their topic sentence for the lyrical structure and they’ll go from there.
CYS: How many rappers are on this tour?
GG: There’ll be two and the DJ will grab the mic, too.
CYS: Are they the focus?
GG: On this tour, the focus is more on the music. The rappers will play part of the ensemble. There’s also a great singer coming too, that girl Fannie, who sings on the live recording.
CYS: Do you feel like you’re breaking down any preconceived barriers?
GG: Well, I think that the nature of iTunes is doing the most to break down barriers. You go to iTunes and you can sort by genre, album, track title. Sort it by track title and scroll down and you’ll hit all kinds of music, all kinds of artists that would never come close to each other in a traditional record store. You start at Nick Drake and next you’re at Nine Inch Nails, Steve Coleman, Nick Cave. If you tried to grab those four records, you’d be walking all over the record store. I think that this generation is becoming a lot more open-minded towards other types of music. But it’s beautiful, and if we didn’t have the technology we have today, I doubt that we could exist. It just costs so much money, man. Today we had a rehearsal, and this guy was there recording it on an iPhone. Then he emailed me an mp3 and I plugged it in an hour later. In 1995, that would have cost $50,000.
CYS: What happens when you get to a venue and you see a stage and say, “Well, we can’t fit on this.”
GG: That doesn’t happen anymore [Laughs]. Now I make sure to call the venue and get the stage dimensions before we say “Yes” to the gig. I wanna know what we’re getting into. It happened in 2005 once, but that was my fault. I was trying to fit everybody on to a stage that we had no business fitting on. But that worked out for a couple musicians, because they showed up and got paid and got to hang out at the bar and watch the show. They weren’t mad at me at all. They were like, “Hey, man. I’ll take my free drinks and $100 and watch the show.” There’s definitely been a learning curve. In ten years, I’ve made enough mistakes to arrive at a good process now.
This article appears in May 22 • 2009.