In 1993, Guru released Jazzmatazz Vol. 1, a record made with live jazz musicians performing alongside his rapping over jazz samples. The concept was described at the time as a fusion — hip-hop meeting jazz — and the description was not inaccurate. It was, however, incomplete.

What Guru was doing was not bringing two distinct traditions into contact. He was making explicit a relationship that had been implicit since hip-hop’s origins in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. Jazz and hip-hop are not separate traditions that occasionally intersect. They are stages in the same tradition.

The Shared Origin

Both jazz and hip-hop emerged from African American communities using available materials to create a music that was theirs. In New Orleans in the 1890s and 1900s, those materials included European instruments, African rhythmic sensibility, and the spiritual and blues traditions of the post-slavery South. In the Bronx in the 1970s, those materials included turntables, records, and the social context of a community that had been systematically excluded from mainstream American culture.

The turntable as instrument is a direct extension of jazz improvisation. The DJ uses a recorded sound as a musician uses an instrument — manipulating it in real time, treating it as material rather than as fixed product. Grandmaster Flash cited jazz drummer Gene Krupa as an influence on his approach to rhythm. DJ Kool Herc’s breakbeat technique — isolating the percussion break on a record and extending it by playing two copies — is structurally identical to jazz’s emphasis on rhythm as the core of musical expression.

Sampling as Jazz Practice

The sampling practice that defined hip-hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s drew heavily from jazz recordings. The producers who shaped the sound of the era — Pete Rock, J Dilla, DJ Premier, Large Professor — were students of the jazz canon in ways that went beyond simple record-digging.

Pete Rock’s sample use is harmonically informed. He did not simply take a bass line or a drum break; he identified harmonic material in jazz recordings — chord voicings, melodic fragments — and built new compositions from them. The jazz vocabulary is embedded in his work at the structural level.

J Dilla’s rhythmic approach is jazz in its deepest sense: a commitment to swung time rather than quantised time, to rhythm as something felt and imprecise rather than mechanically exact. His beats breathe in a way that drum machine programming is not supposed to breathe. He heard this in jazz drumming and rebuilt it in his productions.

Guru, Glasper, and the Explicit Acknowledgment

The acknowledgment of the relationship became explicit in two distinct moments. Jazzmatazz in 1993 was perhaps the first major project that treated jazz and hip-hop as a continuous tradition rather than as separate genres meeting in collision. Guru and the jazz musicians he worked with — Branford Marsalis, Roy Ayers, Donald Byrd — were not translating between languages. They were speaking the same language from different positions.

Robert Glasper’s Black Radio in 2012 performed a similar synthesis with more contemporary materials. Glasper had spent the 2000s developing a piano style that drew equally from jazz harmony and hip-hop rhythm, and Black Radio used that synthesis to produce a record that reached across both audiences not by compromising either but by demonstrating that the compromise was unnecessary — the traditions were already one tradition.

The Current Synthesis

In 2025, the relationship between jazz and hip-hop is no longer a conversation between two genres but a single practice with a long history. Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Makaya McCraven, Nubya Garcia, and Floating Points are all examples of musicians who do not experience the boundary between jazz and hip-hop as a boundary worth respecting.

McCraven’s recording method is particularly instructive. He records live improvised performances and then edits and layers them in the studio — a process that is simultaneously jazz performance and hip-hop production. The seams between the two are invisible because the two are not separate.

The question is not whether jazz and hip-hop are related. Any serious engagement with either tradition makes the answer to that question obvious. The question is what understanding the relationship teaches you about the deeper nature of what music does when it is made by and for a community that needs it.