So it’s hard to imagine Kassa Overall’s I Think I’m Good as the product of any other age but this one, yet it’s also a timeless tale. A high-gloss, trap-jazz, Auto-Tuned singer-songwriter cycle about multiple consciousness, it’s a fragile diary of a young artist’s escape from the comforts of fear, aided by an incredible community of musicians who have his back. More broadly, it’s a kaleidoscopic cut’n’paste opus that bypasses prior, drier conversations about jazz and hip-hop sharing space—even Overall’s masterful 2019 debut, Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz—to express something much more personal, yet also universally relatable.
Some of the greatness of I Think I’m Good comes in the blending of its design and function. The story that 36-year-old Kassa tells, integrating his own lifelong mental-health struggles with the incarceration and subjugation of black America, is in many ways completely novel; even more so is the way he tells it, in expansive song-rap compositions that have the intimacy of bedroom indie-folk murmurs. Until recently, Kassa’s rep rested on being a great young jazz drummer (with an overflow of credits—Geri Allen, Christian McBride, and Arto Lindsay, to name a few—and a stint in Jon Batiste’s band on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert). He also dabbled as a rapper and producer, including collaborations with Francis and the Lights and Das Racist. But his desire to synthesize collective improvisation, electronic production, and rap vocals has been the core of his recent live residencies at New York’s Zinc Bar and the Jazz Gallery, and Go Get Ice Cream approached the jazz/hip-hop discourse from this holistic live-playing-with-rapping-and-electronics direction. It also featured a great song called “Prison and Pharmaceuticals” (chorus: “What’s the best stocks?”) that is a direct thematic harbinger of I Think I’m Good.
Another key precursor was the series of panic attacks that Overall experienced as a young Oberlin Conservatory student in the mid-’00s—one led to his temporary institutionalization—and his subsequent overmedication that went from stabilizer to long-term crutch. I Think I’m Good soundtracks this quiet, numbing struggle in tones both unsettled and empathetic. Beyond simply documenting his own interior dialogues, the album connects them—lyrically, but also sonically—to those of black men’s realities in dealing with Amerikkka’s criminal-justice system. Kassa’s narrative takes the shape of a hallucinatory collage, an almost-old-school mega-mixtape where themes and visions—of personal memories and familiar melody lines, song and sound fragments, a list of confidants from his life and career—flow effortlessly into one another.
The blurring of his own medical experience with notions of incarceration begins with Kassa’s opening line: “I hope they let me go tonight,” he intones on “Visible Walls,” as Brandee Younger’s harp, Jay Gandhi’s bansuri flute, Courtney Bryan’s piano, and a chopped, hummed Auto-Tune melody set up an ominously hushed new-age mood. The childlike delivery of his opening plea in the follow-up (“Please don’t kill me in your sleep”) lands into the same unnerving atmosphere; Joel Ross’ vibraphone adds both melodic beauty and further textural destabilization, compounding Kassa’s chilling words that conflate the real and surreal (“Please don’t mind those chalk lines/They don’t know what’s inside of you and I”). Yet the songs also have musical escape hatches arranged into the claustrophobia. When Younger and Ross play short lead solo lines—the latter in a quick conversation with Theo Croker’s flugelhorn—the spaces unlock in ways that one can imagine growing expansive on stage, supporting evidence that, like the hesitant blues of the album title, Kassa doesn’t mean for it to be a completely dark ride.
One thing that makes such glimmers of hope feel so poignant is the work’s insistence on biography, which grounds it as proof that, despite the lures set by society and individual minds, solutions are also within our grasp. There’s a personal touch in the disassociated and affected voices that litter the album’s landscape, and on the trap production strategies that simultaneously communalize the experience and compound the theme of schizophrenia, whether they take the form of nightmarish asides, philosophical musings, or in-studio instructions to musicians. There’s also a kind of natural narrative flow between the parts of I Think I’m Good that really are diary entries (young Kassa’s cover portrait, or “Landline,” a poetic youthful reminiscence of a kid wondering about “normal,” featuring his brother Carlos on the tenor) and those that are out-and-out role-playing. “Show Me a Prison,” a cautionary tale of the prison industrial complex, features an inmate character named Kassa, a guest turn by activist Angela Davis, and one of the album’s key role-switching lyrics, “There but for fortune, may go you and I,” courtesy of Phil Ochs. In the final biographical projection, “Was She Happy (for Geri Allen),” Kassa and Vijay Iyer eulogize the late pianist, who passed away in 2018 and who collaborated with both men. It closes the album on a psychedelic note, a light drone guiding their Rhodes-drums duet, punctuated by the answer to the songtitle’s question: “Was she happy?” “She was on a quest!”
And what are quests but stories we construct ourselves, for ourselves, even if just by clicking “record” on a smartphone—or in Kassa’s words, on a “backpacker producer” setup he used to document a lion’s share of the raw materials here. It’s heartening that, even in what seems like a limited category, he’s hardly alone in doing this. It’s curious that I Think I’m Good is one of three extraordinarily ambitious recent albums by artists initially recognized as jazz drummers—alongside Moses Boyd’s Dark Matter and Jeremy Cunningham’s The Weather Up There—that combine internal monologues about their own lives with reflections on the social breakdowns happening all around them. In doing so, they have produced musical therapy sessions that chronicle the world as it actually is, and not as it is sold to us.
Buy: Rough Trade
