Lil Jabba: Swisher – FACT magazine: music and art

Lil Jabba: Swisher

The last two years has seen juke and footwork shift gears from a cult, localised dance music to something more globally recognised, with Planet Mu’s genre compilations and artist albums for the likes of DJ Diamond and DJ Nate leading the charge. Just as interesting though, are artists outside Chicago bending juke and footwork’s 160bpm drum-driven dance template into new forms. And those forms are getting weirder.

Enter Lil Jabba. I don’t know anything about Lil Jabba, bar the fact that he’s originally from Australia, and now lives in Baltimore. Swisher is a six track mini-album, available to buy via Bandcamp, and by God it’s good. When you think of lo-fi footwork, you usually think of DJ Nate’s twisted hyperspeed r’n’b, often accompanied by unintentional compression via YouTube, but Jabba’s stuff is far more sonically interesting and, well, sonically pleasant. It’s still hard – ‘Chaos Charge’ lives up to its name with elephantine horns and snapping snares, and ‘Get Up Bitch’ says exactly what you’d expect from its title – but ‘Maven’ is pure honey for the ears, with a marble bassline that recalls Actress, and twisted jazz licks akin to Madlib.

‘Bruiser’ takes things deep underwater with shimmering highs and a gently bobbing bassline, and is the case with several of Swisher’s tracks, although it’s driven by typical footwork percussion – 808 hi-hats and heavily reverberated claps – the drums never dominate, and sometimes they completely disappear into the middle distance. Jabba’s strength lies in his melodies and the way he flips samples, and he knows that sometimes drums can get in the way of that. Even on ‘Skala’, which rides a pretty straight drum grid, the percussion’s quiet; the emphasis on the track’s seaside ambience.

Swisher isn’t perfect; even after one listen, a noticeable gap in quality emerges between its best moments (‘Maven’, ‘Skala’, ‘Raiders’) and its more average ones (‘Get Up Bitch’), but for a a debut record – it’s actually been on Jabba’s Bandcamp page since June 2011 – it shows serious amounts of promise. Most importantly, Jabba already sounds completely unique: unlike other recent footwork appropriators like Machinedrum, Philip D. Kick and Evian Christ (not a slight at any of those artists, I should add), it’s hard to tell where he’s taking his cues from; where the fuck he’s actually coming from. And that makes his music all the more absorbing.

Tam Gunn

This entry was posted on Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 10:58 am and is filed under Album Reviews, Essential Albums, Essentials, Reviews and tagged with Lil Jabba. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

BaalBrame

Why is it that when Fact reviews a white person making Juke, like this guy or Machinedrum, the reviewer says something to the effect of ” this guy who has only been making Juke for a year is better than DJ Roc or RP Boo, who invented it? It is obvious to this reader that the reviewer does not understand how to judge a genre by that genre’s own context. I’m not saying it is exactly racist; I am saying that it is clearly biased toward more European standards of good and bad where in a subjective art form like music, context means everything and that context is RP Boo and Chicago and Gary Indiana and Detroit.
tom lea

I can’t speak for the reviewer, but no one in FACT’s office has seen a picture of Lil Jabba – so we have no idea whether he’s white or black. And at no point does TG compare Jabba to Roc or Boo, both of whom we’ve covered in the magazine in the past (more than we have Lil Jabba, in fact).

On top of that, unless I’m forgetting someone, we’ve hosted footwork mixes from four artists in the last two years, three of whom are black and from Chicago (the other one being Machinedrum).
BOYLAN

mostly chicago is the context. rp boo rashad and spinn. traxman clent gant. the south side and the west side. there are tons of appropriators and the world needs to be cognizant of our context. tekz been making this happen since the 20th century (the 90s). the reviewer might not understand footwork but it seems he’s hinting that jabba does.

make me think of rhythm control : my house

this is our house…

boylan (ghettoteknitianz)
Markus Garvey

I’m With it
BaalBrame

Check out the review of Room(s). That’s a more obvious reference.It clearly calls the Chicago style amateur and Machinedrum’s style not amateur. I love Fact Magazine. I check you guys out everyday and wouldn’t have even heard of Juke had it not been for Fact, Defense is not the stance the should be taken. What should be done is a reevaluation of the language used in reviews and the method one uses to review this sort of thing.This statement was not meant to take anything away from Room(s) or Swisher;both are great records. Its all about the method of analysis used to review these records and the language chosen.
BaalBrame

Check out the review of Room(s). That’s a more obvious reference.It clearly calls the Chicago style amateur and Machinedrum’s style not amateur. I love Fact Magazine. I check you guys out everyday and wouldn’t have even heard of Juke had it not been for Fact, Defense is not the stance the should be taken. What should be done is a reevaluation of the language used in reviews and the method one uses to review this sort of thing.This statement was not meant to take anything away from Room(s) or Swisher;both are great records. Its all about the method of analysis used to review these records and the language chosen.
tom lea

Sorry, I’m not having this. I’ve read both reviews a few times now, and neither are derogatory towards Chicago footwork. They use it as a reference point, and remark on how Jabba and Machinedrum are doing something different, but they in no way say one style is better than the other (and you know what, if they did, I’d have edited both).
BOYLAN

that is the truth.
BOYLAN

yuppp
BOYLAN

jabba’s teklife and its good to see him get love from fact . I see u Jabba.
it would be nice to get some love from fact for some of the people in chicago that been contributing to this genre and don’t get looks…i’d sure like people to know more about the chicago supremacy in footwork tracks…thats what i’m saying. yes the reviews arent derogatory tracks, but on the other hand it seems that the true tracks need to be recognized.
BaalBrame

Ok I’ve read the review of Room(s) again. And it said that DJNate and DJ Elmoe’s music is “Deliciously amateur” and Machine Drum’s is more “studied”. At the time I read it I interpreted it in a negative light. I guess because I’ve dealt with this sort of thing before. I go to school for classical voice and I’m the only black student studying opera in my school. The department head doesn’t see the relevancy of black music and it seems that whenever they talk about jazz they glance over the African American Artists who invented it.
I apologize for the stir my comments have caused. I should’ve done some fact checking before I got all riled up.
tom lea

It’s all good — I’d much rather someone engage in a review the way you’re doing than the short-sighted comments in the Lana Del Rey one for instance. I just take slight offence at an implication that FACT’s in biased against, or derogatory towards, the more traditional Chicago footwotk style.

We were definitely one of the first UK magazines covering it, we put on DJ Spinn’s first London show and we were supposed to put on Rashad’s (as a co-promotion with Night Slugs) until it fell through. We also had Rashad listed in our 2010 albums of the year, and I think both him and Nate featured in our tracks of the year that year too. We’ve featured people like DJ Earl and Leatherface just as much as we have say, Jabba and Distal.

Yeah, that Machinedrum review calls DJ Nate and DJ Elmoe’s style amateurish – but that’s presumably a comment about their individual styles rather than Chicago as a whole (both of their tracks are pretty lo-fi, the stuff I’ve heard anyway). I’m sure you could equally find something on FACT about how great Rashad’s padded basslines sound, or how tight Spinn’s drums are, etc etc.

When all’s said and done, there shouldn’t be an opposition here (I’m not saying you’re trying to create one), and we try to cover as much traditional footwork as we do the more mutant stuff coming from outside Chicago. If you’ve got Chicago stuff to recommend that we haven’t covered, I’m more than up for hearing it – drop us a line on editorial@thevinylfactory.com?
iWork

Real recognize real
Boylannate

that’s what i’m sayin.
BaalBrame

Only my own stuff. I live in Chicago but I wouldn’t call it traditional in the least.

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