onyx ashanti

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Onyx Ashanti is of a generation of musician/artist born into a world samplers, hip hop, internet, cell phones and personal computers. Although his formative musical education was traditional (learning to play saxophone in a primary school music program), he has since transferred this aestetic into the present world of 21st century music performance. An amalgam of tradition and futurism he calls Beatjazz.

“Beatjazz is, in my mind, the natural offspring of jazz and electronic music. The devil is in the details though. When I say "jazz", I mean the concept of jazz. In my mind (all of this comes from my own personal artistic perspective unless otherwise noted), jazz is the art of improvisation. The ability to extrapolate abstract concepts with only minor guides; key, chord progression, tempo, style, etc. it is the ability to convey oneself in any artistic circumstance. side note; IMHO, jazz has been hi jacked, abused, raped and robbed of its power over time by various HWI's (hacks with instruments),

I view jazz as a technical concept rather than the stylistic one it has been saddled with for the last 40 years or so.

Now, when I use the term "Beat", I mean Rhythm, or rather computer generated rhythm. I do not mean to insinuate a stylistic connotation by its use. In other Words, by beat, I don’t mean hip hop OR drum n Bass OR house OR Breakbeat OR....I mean the common aspects of all of them.

"Beatjazz" therefore is a technical concept of rhythm-centric improvisation.”
“What struck me first was that, unlike say jazz, where you have a group of musicians who are extremely well synced with each other, or electronic music where a machine of program is playing preprogrammed parts, beatjazz was able to follow very odd tangents because each element is relative to each element that comes before it. All the parts became glued together much more intimately. But it also became a much more intensive style of music to create and play.

So now Beatjazz has reached a pinnacle where it is now a completely improvised artform, the artifacts of which i call "Blips" (unplanned arrangements from recordings of live improv performances), hopefully eventually becoming a recognized artistic tangent in itself.”