To the chagrin of purists, in the late 1960s jazz musicians began to turn an ear to pop radio and Motown chart-toppers, fusing those and similar styles into soul jazz. Drummer Donald Dean could be found on some of the best sessions, like Les McCann’s Invitation to Openness and Layers. Watching his grandfather play, Jamael Dean took cues for his own approach to the piano. “That’s what made me want to play jazz,” Dean recently told Bandcamp. “Watching him interact with his buddies—that was something I could see for myself.” Just 21 years old, the younger Dean already has quite the resume, backing Kamasi Washington on Heaven and Earth, gigging with fellow Angelenos Thundercat, Carlos Niño, and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and now studying jazz performance at the New School.
Black Space Tapes announces Dean’s arrival, and it is an impressive debut, revealing a wide-eyed view of jazz as broad as his grandfather’s. Allowing jazz to imbibe hip-hop, electronic, R&B, and ambient, Dean orients the century-old artform firmly toward the future. All these ingredients are there from the jump in the astonishing, amoebic “Akamara.” The song takes its title from Yoruba cosmology, a concept that Dean breaks down as “the spirit of nothing that expanded the universe into what it is now,” which the piece resembles in form and sound. Across 11 minutes, Dean confidently mingles spiritual jazz and primordial ooze, tension and release, darkness and light. Wordless ululations from vocalist Sharada Shashidhar, field recordings of birds, shamanic percussion from Niño, and looped brass create a vast amount of space at the start, which Dean’s piano whirls through and fills up. It sounds fidgety at first, but as the piece continues to unfurl, Dean nudges the band into uncharted realms, imparting energy during the calmer moments, then easing back as it grows in chaotic density. Throughout, he keeps a firm sense of control, even in those outer-space moments when his touch on the keys is at its airiest.
A quarter of an hour later, “Akamara” returns in a decidedly mutated remix, exhibiting more of Dean’s skill set. As a modern jazz player, his talents extend beyond chops to the ability to chop a beat, and his remix proves him as cagey as Makaya McCraven and Karriem Riggins. Dean flits between dizzying upper-register piano loops and a muted horn, mixing it all with a muddy, low-end wobble; in the song’s back half he takes flight with one of the album’s sweeter solos. “Olokun” continues down the eclectic path, with Dean sussing out a head-nodding beat in ocean waves and seagulls, every warped element Silly-Puttying around like some sort of Flying Lotus soundscape.
Despite Dean’s knack for conjuring weird ambient headspaces, the most contemplative moments of Black Space Tapes arise when they hew closest to the jazz tradition. “Adawa” simmers and assuredly builds, and Dean is at his lyrical best, his solo bringing to mind the restraint and mindfulness of icons like Ahmad Jamal and Andrew Hill. He structures the piece so that every instrument—from Atwood-Ferguson’s nimble five-string viola to Tim Angulo’s deep-pocket drums—can shine. That sense of balance is integral to his approach. It’s a short album—just six tracks, not even 38 minutes in all—but the brevity works in its favor. As far out as Dean and his group travel, they ultimately remain gracefully grounded.
Buy: Rough Trade
