Almost five years ago, when Gang Starr opted to close the book on a working relationship, Hip Hop fans had a lot to say. Those conversations, some of which are still ongoing, tended to be validating of the producer who helped birth the sounds of Biggie, Jay-Z and Nas than the emcee who largely kept his work as an in-house commodity.

Within that trend, perhaps many had all-too-quickly overlooked Jazzmatazz, a four-part franchise that had revived, reconsidered and recreated the careers of Jazz legends like Roy Ayers, Donald Byrd and Lonnie Liston Smith. These releases were not only audio textbooks in the mid-to-late '90s, but they sold well, backed by Chrysalis/EMI, and spawning three years of extensive touring.

Despite the early resistance in Volume 4, the recent mixtape Back To The Future garnered rave reviews. With assistance from everyone from Common to Mr. Lif, the mixtape that feels like an album is continuing that education at a time when skeptics argue we need it most. Joined by his musical companion Solar, the two scoff at the Grammy Awards Nomination Committee, the major labels and the term Smooth Jazz. 7 Grand has withstood its first four years, see how the Brooklyn imprint intends to go forward.

HipHopDX.com: The Back To The Future mixtape is getting some strong reviews, which perhaps comes as a surprise to some. How is this reaction affirming what you’re doing?
Guru: It’s very rewarding. We started 7 Grand in 2004 with the premise of doing just that: stimulating Hip Hop, creating balance and bringing interest and love back to the whole east coast/New York scene and so forth. In that respect, it’s very, very rewarding. The mixtape is a raw companion to Jazzmatazz 4, and Solar brilliantly came up with the concept, and it’s setting out to do exactly as we set it out to do.
Solar: Even out of the miles of idiots can come a genius thought. The idiots, in this case, are the major labels. When we were shopping Jazzmatazz to them – and of course Jazzmatazz was always a major label franchise for the first three episodes, when we shopped part four, the responses were moronic at best. “This is too much for the kids to buy. It’s too musical, too intelligent!” I don’t need to go any further. So I walked away thinking they’re wrong, completely, ‘cause I know that the young heads are not that stupid out there. I think it’s foolish when anybody – especially men of power, are gonna count out a whole generation as stupid. I couldn’t believe that. It stuck with me. We’ve invigorated the franchise. Part four had to be at a musically higher stature. I had to do that. I thought we would have had a Grammy-worthy album there, and I’m very disappointed with the Grammy’s not nominating us. We worked hard and endeavored hard to make that album, but the mix CD was fun. Hard, bangin’ beats. It really just flowed.

DX: As far as the reactions you got from the majors at the time of Volume 4, was positioning this release against EMI’s release of Jazzmatazz’s Greatest Hits a way of getting them back, by riding their marketing budget?
S: Actually, it’s just the opposite. They were very spiteful to Guru. [Guru laughs] They were being very mean and arrogant. They didn’t even let Guru pick the songs on that. We had to find out through the grapevine that it was coming out. They gave us no advances. They acted very hostile towards us, and it’s a puzzling situation considering how much money he’s made for them. It’s really a statement to how evil these people have become.

DX: From intros to interludes throughout the Jazzmatazz franchise, anyone can get an education on the correlation between Hip Hop and Jazz. In terms of culture and lifestyle, how are these cultures the same?
G: It went from being an underground thing in its inception and then it became popular, more mainstream, and then it got embraced more overseas – both Jazz and Hip Hop have gone through that. Overseas, they embraced the organic-ness and the pureness of each culture, whether it be Jazz or Hip Hop, and held it down till the U.S. got back to it. I would say that’s a similarity.
S: I accessed some DVDs and archival footage of the Jazz culture. Unlike Guru, I didn’t really come from any real [Jazz] upbringing; the streets brought me up. I’m not that much unlike 50 Cent in some ways, we just took different paths in life to where we got. So I accessed those DVDs, and I was listening to a [John] Coltrane record, and I heard a bass part [mimics the sounds] and it sounded like [Chic’s] “Good Times” [mimics]. Niles Rodgers from Chic was basically listening to what these cats where doing, and just took a heavy electronic, Fender bass and a heavy Disco drum beat and transferred it. Then I started listening to Steely Dan and Earth Wind & Fire, and I said, “This is all Jazz. It’s just been reformatted, reinvented and refused.”

In their culture, [race] was good. In Hip Hop, I was a part of that. They saw us on the train with boom-boxes and our sneakers off, and people were afraid of us. We knew what profiling was before it was even called profiling. Within Hip Hop culture though, we accepted the white kids with open arms; they were welcome to come to our parties and experience what we were doing. Equally, interracial dating and sex and so on – this is the same thing you see in Jazz. Continued on page 2 »