I feel the album truly kicks off with Speaking Gently (although And That, Too is a good warmup). There’s a clear chorus, beautiful solos throughout, and a sense of forward motion that forces you to sit up and take notice. Even when the album is playing in the background, you know when Speaking Gently is on. It’s pure jazz.

BADBADNOTGOOD isn’t some sort of jazz throwback, though. These guys are carving their own path, and they’re doing it with really great guest moments. Sam Herring’s guest performance on Time Moves Slow elevates the track, but Kaytranada’s spot on Lavender feels like a game-changer. His electronic movements support the band at all time, and fit in well with their jazzy modus operandi without overwhelming them — but his parts also add a certain amount of texture that’s absolutely blissful.

These guest spots, even though they’re not strictly jazzy, feel like they imbibe the genre’s playful experimentation and delight in surprise.

Even Hyssop of Love, which features rapper Mick Jenkins spitting vocal lines on the track, feels like jazzy moment. So much hip hop comes from jazz, and it’s neat to see them play well together. As the single hip hop track on the record, it feels out of place and it slows the momentum, but it’s also this oddly refreshing moment that occasionally recalls the best in jazz rap — like A Tribe Called Quest, Kendrick, and De La Soul.

IV, the title track, feels the most traditional on the record. For a moment, I thought I was listening to a cover of a Bitch’s Brew track. It’s all over the place and wild, and it feels as authentic as jazz can be.

For BADBADNOTGOOD, this record feels like a statement solidifying their place as some of the best — and trendiest — jazz players alive right now. IV is a monument to the genre, and one that fans and non-fans alike will love.

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To that point: the same week that Chance the Rapper decides to drop a new mixtape, Oddisee is doing promotion for his new instrumental mixtape on NPR.

To be clear, The Odd Tape is not a terribly weird record. It’s a laid-back instrumental hip hop record that feels like a Saturday off for a busy guy. The track list reads that way too: song titles like Alarmed, Right Side of the Bed, No Sugar No Cream, On the Table, Out at Night, and Still Sleeping are indicative that the tracks are perhaps thematically connected only by the pursuit of a daily activity list.

It’s a record that’s well-suited to making eggs on a Saturday morning, getting a bit of work done mid-day, or lounging around at the gym, but it’s clearly not making any lyrical statements. (Oddisee is likely saving all of those for his big album release this fall.) What it is doing is suggesting that it’s okay to relax a little bit, to enjoy the day.

With The Odd Tape, Oddisee isn’t purposefully trying to be different (even though he’s usually different by nature). In this case, it’s just him noting that it’s an unusual mixtape because it’s completely vocal-less. This is his time to have fun at the boards and experiment a little bit, maybe try out some new things, focus on textures, and create a hip hop record your kids can hear you listening to, or a hip hop record that won’t get you riled up after a long day at work.

Oddisee is stepping into the avant-garde instrumental hip hop realm, and he’s doing a great job of it.

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But most importantly, The Rebellion Sessions was put together in a week with a focus on live performance. As a result of stripped-down production, the album feels raw, intimate, and quietly forward-thinking.

Black Milk is only a producer on the record, leaving all the writing and musicianship to the Nat Turner Band. The first spoken word comes in the opening seconds of Burn, when one of the men in the band says, “What I want to bring back is the feeling” before they all jump into a jazzy bass riff and keyboard line.

And it is all about that old-school jazz and funk feeling on The Rebellion Sessions. On rare occasion, it feels like we’re all waiting for Black Milk to start rapping — no doubt a result of him producing with the ear of a hip hop performer. But for the majority of the time, The Rebellion Sessions are layered with a surprising amount of density — especially given the size of the trio performing the music.

The best tracks on the record are the ones with playful attitudes and an emphasis on the funk aspect of the jazz fusion. Just a Thing and Electric Spanking are highlights for me, showing off the band’s propensity for great funky jams, but also revelling in their ability to create beats that feel timeless and familiar all at once.

Most impressive, though, is the way Black Milk manages to make all these sounds approachable for an audience that might not be ready to embrace jazz the way he and some of hip hop’s luminaries already have. Despite the virtuosity (Take 2 and You Need This Light both belong on Robert Glasper records, for example), The Rebellion Sessions feels like a love letter to jazz that was made for everybody. It’s Black Milk’s way of demonstrating what makes the genre so wonderful. I hope he allows even more jazz on his next rap record.

That being said, it’s impossible to talk about The Rebellion Sessions as if it’s solely a Black Milk record. This is Nat Turner’s project through and through. The band was named for a slave revolutionary in the nineteenth century. In 1831, Nat Turner led a rebellion of slaves in Virginia that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of black and white people. He was hung in November of that year.

Both the Nat Turner Band and The Rebellion Sessions are named for a man that is now remembered as a forward-thinking vigilante, a precursor in many ways to Malcolm X. And while I don’t think the musical comparison is incredibly apt, there’s something to it: The Nat Turner Band are writing jazz for a genre whose fans are still yet to embrace it and rebelling against the norms. The Rebellion Sessions is a spellbinding record.

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But 40 Winks, a Belgian duo, has gone on to have a successful career in experimental instrumental hip hop, using the ideas on Sound Puzzle to realize their sound and lay out the foundations that they would continue to play off for the next decade.

Sound Puzzle is an amalgamation of many influences, which may be obvious from the title, but what’s impressive about the record — and 40 Winks as an artist — is how it manages to merge all these sounds and make something cohesive out of it. It’s weird, but not in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable — that weirdness is what makes it unique. The record makes for a compelling Saturday morning lounging at home.

The music also feels as if it tells a narrative, thanks to some well-placed vocal interludes that tell something of a story behind a husband and a wife. The music follows the narrative thematically, and as the marriage begins to deteriorate, the beats and loops become a little more rhythmic and tense.

This makes Sound Puzzle feel like an incredibly coherent album; you shouldn’t skip tracks or be selective if you want to hear the whole experience. Amazingly, this still holds up despite the deluxe version’s additional tracks.

This could be because the additional tracks were originally included with the release in 2007, but in a limited edition print run of 100 cassettes. Times have changed though: with updated (and much more interesting) cover art, the record is now on vinyl for the first time (an infinitely better listening experience than a tape, of course), and those additional tracks are available for all of us to enjoy.

It’s a good time to be a fan of 40 Winks.

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The record is basically Rodney-Hall getting inventive and exploring a little bit about what gets him excited, and you can tell he’s just happy to be making music. Compared to some of the hip hop beats you might be used to, Rodney-Hall’s will sound a little less produced (particularly at a higher volume), but this is a guy with a lot of great ideas.

What I like about Rodney-Hall is that he reminds me more of Tycho than he does of a hip hop backing track. And it’s great for him to explore this a little more fully. This album is mostly electronic, mostly inspired, and largely pretty good. Give it a listen before this label blows up.

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