Acid Jazz

What it is

Dingwalls, Camden, Sunday afternoons from 1986 onward, where Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge played Blue Note and Prestige records to people who had been at an acid house party the night before. Eddie Piller and Peterson named a label Acid Jazz as a joke about that collision, then Peterson left and started Talkin' Loud and the joke turned into a scene with two catalogues behind it. Almost none of it is programmed. The Brand New Heavies, the James Taylor Quartet, Corduroy, Galliano, Incognito, Mother Earth and the early Jamiroquai records were bands, playing rare groove and boogaloo and Blue Note soul-jazz with the amps turned up. That is the honest reason this page sits in Other rather than in a family named after a machine. What connects it to the rest of the site is that the drum part is a groove, repeated, at a fixed tempo, for six minutes, and that DJs played it in clubs alongside house.

What it sounds like

Dry, close and mid-heavy. The kit is a small jazz set with a coated snare, recorded with few enough microphones that the room does most of the work, and the cymbals are always slightly too loud because that is how the records they were copying sounded. A Hammond through a Leslie carries the harmony, with the drawbars pulled to a fat 888000 and the percussion on. Bass is a Precision with flatwounds and a bit of thumb. Horns arrive in threes and play unison lines. Wah-wah guitar sits low and out of the way. Nothing is gated, nothing is sidechained, and the whole mix has a plate on it rather than a hall.

Key elements

• The ride carries the timeThe drummer is on the ride cymbal, not the hi-hat, playing eighths with the bell taking beats 1 and 3. The hats are being closed by a foot, which is a different and much quieter sound.
• Ghost notesQuiet snare taps between the backbeats at a quarter of their volume, played with the stick barely leaving the head. Take them out and the same pattern turns into a rock beat.
• Hammond and LeslieA B3 or a clone with the drawbars set fat, the percussion switch on, and the Leslie kicked from slow to fast at the end of a phrase. The speaker change is the arrangement.
• Rare groove chord movementDorian vamps that shift up a tone or drop a minor third, borrowed straight from late sixties soul-jazz. Two chords is common, one chord is not.
• Horns in unisonTrumpet, tenor and trombone playing the same line an octave apart rather than harmonised, recorded in one take with a single overhead pair.

How to get them

• Program the ride, not the hatPut eighths on a ride sample and reserve the closed hat for beats 2 and 4 as a foot chick. If you use a hi-hat lane for the time you will get big beat instead.
• Ghost everything you canAdd snare hits at velocity 26 to 38 on the sixteenths either side of the backbeat, then vary each one by a few counts so no two match. Flat ghosts are worse than none.
• Swing at 58 and then nudgeSet the sixteenths to 58 percent, then drag the backbeat 8 to 12 milliseconds late by hand. A drummer playing behind the beat is a placement, not a swing setting.
• Record the organ badly on purposeTwo microphones on the Leslie horn and one on the drum, about 30cm out, and let the cabinet distort a little. A clean B3 plugin with no speaker on it sounds like a demo.
• Leave the low end aloneNo sub, no sidechain and no 30Hz. High-pass the whole mix at 45Hz and let the kick sit around 80 to 120Hz where a real one does. These records were cut for vinyl.
• Play the horn line firstWrite a four bar unison figure before you write anything else, then build the rhythm section under it. Acid jazz arrangements are horn-led even when the horns are absent for a minute at a time.

Reference points

The Brand New Heavies, the James Taylor Quartet, Galliano, Corduroy, Incognito, Mother Earth, Greyboy and Jamiroquai's first album, plus the Acid Jazz and Talkin' Loud catalogues. Reference points for the sound, not endorsements.