For more than 15 years, Adrian Younge has provided the backbeat for a large swath of Black entertainment — literally.
In addition to composing the scores for Marvel’s “Luke Cage,” the James Patterson-inspired series “Cross,” Queen Latifah’s “Equalizer” reboot and the Blaxploitation riff “Black Dynamite” (as well as its animated spinoff), the Los Angeles native’s work as a composer, arranger, producer and performer has fueled tracks by Jay-Z, Ghostface Killah, Talib Kweli, Kendrick Lamar and dozens of other rappers. The record label he co-founded with A Tribe Called Quest member Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the cheekily named Jazz Is Dead, was conceived in 2017 not simply to pay tribute to aging genre luminaries like Gary Bartz and Lonnie Liston Smith, but also to give them an opportunity to record new music decades after their respective heydays.
On April 18, Younge releases “Something About April III,” the operatic conclusion — and culmination — of a trilogy whose origins reach back almost twice that long, to the first days of his career. The album’s musical influences draw upon the many Brazilian legends (including Marcos Valle, Azymuth and João Donato) and other international artists (including Ghanian guitarist Ebo Taylor and late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen) he’s recorded and performed live with via Jazz Is Dead. It additionally symbolizes a transition Younge calls “from sampler to symphony,” commemorated with a concert series (including an April 17 date at the Soraya on the campus of Cal State Northridge) featuring a 35-piece orchestra he’ll conduct himself.
Jazmin Hicks for Linear Labs
It’s a journey that began when he decided to teach himself how to make music like the records he loved to sample as an aspiring producer. “I realized I was becoming more inspired by the records than I was the derivative music I was making,” Younge tells Variety. “It was actually the stuff that came before hip-hop that set the foundation for me, because I feel as though hip-hop never really mastered composition … I realized I had to learn how to play instruments.”
With his spare cash, Younge began acquiring instruments — a Fender Rhodes piano, a bass guitar, drum set, guitar — and teaching himself to use them by copying the riffs sampled in his favorite songs. As he became musically proficient, he retained a crate-digger’s sensibility as a composer. “Hip-hop gave us ears to hear certain things that other people can’t, and those ears are essentially based upon hip-hop being the bricolage of vinyl culture,” Younge says. “It’s all about our ears saying, ‘OK, we’re going to take that part and make something new out of it.’ So I write from that perspective.”
After composing the score for “Black Dynamite” in 2009, Younge reconfigured his 2000 debut EP, “Venice Dawn,” into “Something About April” as a clearinghouse for his ever-expanding musical inspirations. “I wanted to record an album that represented my DJ crate,” he says. “In my crate, I would have Wu-Tang, Delfonics, Ennio Morricone, Portishead, Air, Stereolab.” To accompany the late 1960s-set narrative, the record pointedly features a Black man and a white woman on the cover, “because you would never see that kind of interracial couple on an album cover in the sixties or the seventies.”
Because of the deliberate insularity of his vision, Younge was thrilled — but initially unprepared — by how strongly listeners responded to the album. “When I create, I create for this fake audience in my head, and I have to make sure that this fake audience in my head really likes what I’m doing,” he confesses. “So when I saw the reaction of people, I was like, ‘Really? Damn. OK, let’s do another.’”
Jazmin Hicks for Linear Labs
In the five years between “Something About April” and its 2016 sequel, Younge produced albums by Ghostface Killah, Souls of Mischief and Bilal, collaborated with Philadelphia R&B legends the Delfonics and composed the score for the first season of Marvel’s “Luke Cage.” It was on the Souls of Mischief album that he first worked with Muhammad, who says the two of them quickly identified a kindred creative spirit in one another. “I saw that his process was very similar to mine,” Muhammad remembers. “He comes from the same place that I come from in terms of digging in the crates and sampling records, and kind of hitting a wall where you want to build on to a song and finding someone else’s idea to make a song grow.”
Muhammad says Younge’s “fake audience” not only fuels his music but gives it a unique artistic purity. “He is an audience of one — and that one is himself,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that he’s not making music for everyone to enjoy, because he is. But the audience of one is the ultimate level of freedom for a creative person. There aren’t any outside voices getting in. Adrian is in a solitude place and I think that is the best place for a creative person to be. And he uses that solitude to then go in and be sensational with his music.”
Their collaboration quickly grew, leading not only to music for both seasons of “Luke Cage” but the genre mash-up album “The Midnight Hour.” Partnering with their shared manager Andrew “Dru” Lojero and former Sony Music exec Adam Block, the two inveterate crate-diggers also founded Jazz Is Dead to create a pipeline for producing new material by their musical heroes, some well-established in hip-hop circles and others more recently discovered. “In my travels around the world, nothing has affected me as much musically as Brazil has,” Younge says. “I kept on taking trips out there and it allowed me to get closer to the icons like Marcos Valle, Hyldon, Azymuth, Joao Donato, Joyce. And I was like, ‘Yo, if I could record albums with these cats in my studio, it would just be a dream come true’.”
Their Highland Park studio, Linear Labs, offers a fully functional recording space, while business offices next door package and promote the resulting work both for release on vinyl and via tours and events that span the globe. “Dru handles all the concerts and handles a lot of other logistics too. There is no Jazz Is Dead without Dru — he’s the one who even came up with the name,” Younge says. “When it comes to music, I make the yes or no decision. All of the albums record [at the studio] because it has to be an analog, like my sound. Then when we’re doing an album, the great majority of them are [done by] me and Ali.”
Including many for the artists listed above, they’ve since released more than 20 albums and coordinated live performances or tribute shows, while mounting one-off events such as last year’s 80th birthday celebration for if-you-know-you-know jazz producer Larry Mizell. The work runs parallel to Younge’s many scoring gigs, as well as his solo projects. Like “Something About April II” before it, he hadn’t planned on a third installment, but quickly realized that “April III” was an opportunity to fold into his work the many musical lessons he’d learned, “I thought to myself, how can I give back to a culture that’s given so much to the world?” he says.
“Usually what Brazilian artists do is write their music in English in hopes to blow up abroad. I decided to write this album for them because the audience in my head said the best thing you could do to pay homage to a culture is force myself to write in a language that is not native to my own,” he adds.
Adrian Younge for Linear Labs
Set against the tumultuous cultural backdrop of Brazil, the album’s florid, psychedelic soul chronicles the relationship between a darker-skinned Black man and a lighter-skinned Black woman. Paired with the Portuguese lyrics are whiffs of Younge’s other influences: the string-laden “Nos Somos as Estrelas” evokes the sunnier edge of French electronic band Air set to an Al Jackson Jr. backbeat, while “Esperando por Voce” uses cascading keyboards and disembodied female voices like a vintage music cue from Goblin. Given its idiosyncratic inspirations, it comes as little surprise that Younge says that he feels more outside of the mainstream recording industry than ever before. “I don’t really consider myself a part of modern Black contemporary music because I don’t identify with most of it that’s out right now.”
Yet with the Northridge show coming up and a performance of all three albums scheduled for May in São Paulo, Younge says he’s learned how to strike a balance between satisfying his “audience of one” and the growing legion of fans who agree that there’s something about “April.” “That’s where me being a DJ comes in,” he says. “As a DJ, your job is to be an arbiter of cool. You’re trying to put a whole bunch of music together that these people probably would not rock to on their own, but because you’re doing it they’re down with it.”
With his many partnerships and ventures poised for even bigger exposure, Younge looks at the release of “Something About April III” as more than a typical album cycle — rather, it’s an arrival. “This concert series is the greatest moment of my career,” Younge says. “I know this sounds strange, but I kind of look at this as my debut, as if I’ve been doing all this work for the last 30 years for this moment to tell people, ‘This is the Adrian Younge.’
“By creating for this audience in my head, I feel as though I’m trying to develop the best version of myself,” Younge says. “Going from some hip-hop dude in his bedroom sampling things to getting to be a Quincy Jones and doing his Quincy Jones stuff is mind-boggling. It’s a dream that I never thought would come true.”
