Before the Algorithms Knew What to Call Them
BADBADNOTGOOD began with a problem of classification. When Matthew Tavares, Chester Hansen and Alexander Sowinski met while studying jazz at Humber College in Toronto around 2010, they shared the technical vocabulary expected of young jazz musicians, but their listening habits did not respect the boundaries of the curriculum. Hip-hop was not an occasional reference point or a fashionable ingredient to be added to jazz after the fact. They listened seriously to artists such as MF DOOM and Odd Future alongside the jazz tradition they were studying. In an early interview, the musicians described bonding over hip-hop, jazz and contemporary beat music, while later recalling that the institutional environment could sometimes feel like a bubble.
That distinction is crucial to understanding why BADBADNOTGOOD mattered. Jazz and hip-hop had been connected for decades before they appeared. Hip-hop producers had sampled jazz extensively; musicians such as Guru, Q-Tip, Madlib and J Dilla had developed sophisticated relationships with jazz records; projects including Jazzmatazz had made the connection explicit. BADBADNOTGOOD did not invent the encounter. What they did was approach it from another direction. Instead of sampling a jazz recording to make a beat, they asked what would happen if musicians trained to improvise treated contemporary hip-hop production as material for a live band.
The answer eventually became one of the most recognizable instrumental sounds to emerge from Toronto in the 2010s.
But it began much more modestly.
Humber College and the Productive Friction of Jazz School
The story of BADBADNOTGOOD’s early relationship with Humber College has sometimes been exaggerated into a simplistic tale of rebellious students battling conservative teachers. The reality is more useful.
The musicians were receiving serious jazz training. At the same time, they felt a disconnect between some of the music emphasized academically and the music that shaped their everyday listening. In interviews, the band described presenting material related to Odd Future in a school setting and encountering a response that was far less enthusiastic than the reaction they would soon receive online. Sowinski later characterized it less dramatically as a disconnect: the teachers simply were not familiar with some of the music the group was bringing into the room.
That is a more revealing story than the mythology of three students who “hated jazz school.”
They were not rejecting musical knowledge.
They were questioning what could be done with it.
Jazz education had given them harmony, ensemble skills, improvisational vocabulary and technical discipline. Hip-hop suggested another way of organizing those resources. A beat might remain harmonically static for long periods while accumulating power through repetition. Bass could become the principal architectural element. A short melodic fragment might matter more than a complicated sequence of chord substitutions. Timbre could be as important as harmonic development.
These were not necessarily opposing ideas.
BADBADNOTGOOD began discovering what happened when they occupied the same room.
The Odd Future Sessions
The internet supplied the room that the classroom could not.
The trio began recording interpretations of music associated with Odd Future, the Los Angeles collective whose rise was itself inseparable from early-2010s internet culture. Rather than treating the material as novelty jazz covers, BADBADNOTGOOD approached it with the energy of musicians who actually listened to the records.
That sounds obvious.
It was not.
Jazz interpretations of contemporary popular music can easily become demonstrations of superiority: the implicit message is that a supposedly simple song has been elevated through reharmonization and instrumental virtuosity. BADBADNOTGOOD’s early videos worked differently. They seemed interested in discovering why the original music was effective in the first place.
The groove mattered.
The bass mattered.
Repetition mattered.
Attitude mattered.
Then improvisation could enter.
The resulting Odd Future Sessions began circulating online. Tyler, the Creator noticed them and helped expose the trio to a much larger audience. Innovative Leisure’s account of the band’s early history identifies Tyler as one of their first important champions and notes that live jams with him helped accelerate their discovery.
Suddenly, three jazz students in Toronto were being discussed by listeners who might never have searched for a contemporary jazz trio.
Tyler, the Creator Comes to the Basement
The relationship quickly moved beyond an online endorsement. Tyler eventually performed with the group, producing basement-session videos that became an important part of BADBADNOTGOOD’s early identity.
The visual setting mattered almost as much as the music.
There was no formal jazz-club atmosphere.
No attempt to communicate seriousness through suits, seated audiences or institutional prestige.
The musicians looked like people their own age playing music they actually enjoyed.
Sowinski’s pig mask became part of the group’s early imagery. The performances could be chaotic and playful. The distinction between rehearsal, jam session and internet content became deliberately unclear.
Yet underneath that informality was real musicianship.
This combination proved powerful.
BADBADNOTGOOD did not ask young hip-hop listeners to enter traditional jazz culture before engaging with improvisation. They brought improvisational music into spaces those listeners already inhabited.
YouTube became part of the venue.
Why the Covers Worked
Consider what happens when a hip-hop track becomes material for a piano-bass-drums trio.
A producer can construct a beat from precisely controlled elements. A drummer performing it live has to decide which characteristics are essential. If every programmed detail is reproduced literally, the performance can become rigid. If the drummer “jazzes it up” indiscriminately, the identity of the beat disappears.
Sowinski developed an approach in which the weight and repetition of hip-hop rhythm remained central while live variation created movement around it.
Hansen faced a related challenge on bass. Hip-hop often gives low frequencies enormous structural importance. A conventional walking bass approach would radically alter that architecture. Instead, repeated figures and deep electric-bass lines could preserve the physical center of the original while creating space for interaction.
Tavares then had to decide what the keyboard should do with material that might not require continuous harmonic movement.
Sometimes the most intelligent choice was not to add more chords.
The trio was learning restraint.
That lesson would become increasingly important as it moved from covers toward original composition.
BBNG: A Band Introduces Itself Through Other People’s Music
BADBADNOTGOOD’s first release, BBNG, appeared in 2011 and reflected the culture from which the group emerged. The repertoire included interpretations connected with artists such as A Tribe Called Quest, Waka Flocka Flame and Odd Future, placing rap material alongside the band’s developing instrumental identity. Innovative Leisure dates the first EP to June 2011.
At this stage, the covers were not a weakness.
They were the argument.
A listener who recognized the source material could immediately hear what the trio changed. Rhythmic relationships became visible because human musicians had to negotiate them in real time. Harmonic possibilities opened. Improvisation stretched forms that had originally been constructed through production.
But something else was happening.
The musicians were learning how not to sound like a conventional jazz trio.
This is an important distinction.
Playing a hip-hop song with jazz instruments does not automatically create a new language. If the rhythm section simply swings and the pianist substitutes more complicated chords, the result remains traditional jazz wearing contemporary repertoire.
BADBADNOTGOOD increasingly preserved the logic of the beat.
That was the more consequential choice.
BBNG2: Expansion Without Permission
The second project, BBNG2, followed in 2012. Its repertoire made the group’s refusal of genre boundaries even clearer, moving through material associated with artists from hip-hop and contemporary popular music while including original compositions. The record also featured additional musicians, including saxophonist Leland Whitty, who would later become a central member of the band.
The eclecticism could have felt random.
Instead, it reflected the listening environment of musicians whose libraries were not organized according to traditional jazz programming.
This is one of the reasons BADBADNOTGOOD connected so strongly with listeners of their generation. Streaming and digital music culture were already weakening the practical significance of genre divisions. A listener could move from MF DOOM to Aphex Twin to Bill Evans to My Bloody Valentine without changing physical record stores or radio stations.
The trio’s repertoire made that listening behavior audible.
Jazz became one language among several rather than the category controlling everything else.
Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt and Learning to Be Useful
The Odd Future connection also led to practical opportunities. BADBADNOTGOOD worked around artists from that community, including serving as a backing band for Frank Ocean at Coachella and collaborating in contexts connected to Earl Sweatshirt. Contemporary interviews show the group discussing these experiences while they were still very early in their career.
This mattered because backing another artist teaches lessons that a leader project cannot.
The band cannot occupy every available space.
The arrangement has to support the song.
Dynamics must respond to a vocalist.
Instrumental complexity becomes useful only when it improves the performance.
For musicians who had initially gained attention through energetic reinterpretations and improvisation, these situations encouraged another kind of maturity.
The question was no longer simply:
What can we do with this music?
It became:
What does this music need from us?
That shift would prove essential when the group began collaborating with major hip-hop artists rather than merely covering them.
Jazz Meets Hip-Hop? Not Quite
The phrase “jazz meets hip-hop” follows BADBADNOTGOOD everywhere, but it creates the misleading impression that the two traditions existed independently until the band introduced them.
The relationship is far older.
Hip-hop’s history is full of jazz samples and references. Jazz musicians had engaged with rap rhythms and production well before BADBADNOTGOOD formed. Toronto itself contained multiple musical communities in constant contact.
What distinguished BBNG was therefore not the existence of the connection.
It was their generational position inside it.
They had grown up after hip-hop had already become one of the world’s dominant musical cultures.
They did not encounter rap as an external style that jazz needed to absorb in order to remain contemporary.
It was already part of their musical identity.
That difference explains why the early performances rarely feel like crossover exercises.
There is no ceremonial meeting.
The musicians simply play.
Moving Away From the Cover Band
Success created its own danger.
BADBADNOTGOOD could easily have become known permanently as the clever young jazz group that performed hip-hop covers.
The format was accessible.
The videos were shareable.
Recognizable songs attracted listeners.
But the same formula that created an audience could eventually restrict the band.
The crucial transition was therefore from reinterpretation to composition.
Could the group create original music with the same rhythmic identity and immediacy?
Could it retain listeners when recognition of a Tyler, the Creator or Gucci Mane track was removed?
Could the musicians demonstrate that their relationship with hip-hop had changed how they composed rather than merely what they covered?
The answer began emerging before III, but that album would make the shift explicit.
III: No Covers to Hide Behind
Released in May 2014, III was BADBADNOTGOOD’s first album composed entirely of original material.
That fact is more important than any claim that the album was a “masterpiece” or that it revolutionized jazz.
For the first time, listeners had to evaluate the band’s musical identity without the interpretive framework of recognizable rap songs.
The trio responded by creating a record that retained the lessons of its early work while expanding its palette.
Rhythmic repetition remained important.
Bass remained central.
Electronic textures and studio decisions became increasingly significant.
Jazz improvisation remained available but no longer had to dominate every composition.
The album could move through angular instrumental passages, atmospheric material and beat-centered structures without announcing every stylistic transition.
This was the point at which BADBADNOTGOOD became much harder to dismiss as an internet phenomenon.
“Can’t Leave the Night”
“Can’t Leave the Night” became one of the clearest examples of the group’s emerging compositional identity.
The track does not depend on a familiar hip-hop sample or guest rapper. Its power comes from atmosphere, low-end weight, repetition and gradual development. The rhythm feels informed by beat production, but the performance remains unmistakably live.
That combination captures a central BBNG principle.
The band did not attempt to make acoustic musicians sound completely electronic.
Nor did it treat electronic production as something inferior to live musicianship.
Instead, the musicians asked what a live ensemble could learn from records built through production.
Repetition could be compositional.
Texture could create form.
Bass could carry narrative.
A groove could remain in place long enough for small changes to become significant.
Those lessons would travel far beyond III.
The Studio Becomes Part of the Instrument
There is one element of the old JazzLatitude article that deserves to survive in corrected form: the importance of recording choices on III.
The old version surrounded the subject with unsupported claims about frequency ranges, sub-bass performance and audiophile equipment. None of that is necessary.
There is a much better documented story.
In a 2014 interview around the album’s release, Chester Hansen explained that earlier projects had been recorded digitally wherever the band could find space, while III was recorded direct to tape at Revolution Recording in Toronto, with overdubs and mixing completed at the group’s home studio shared with producer Frank Dukes. Hansen described the band’s growing interest in vintage equipment and analog sound.
That is editorially valuable because it tells us something about the band’s development.
Studio sound was becoming part of composition.
The question was no longer merely how the trio performed.
It was how the performance should exist as a record.
Frank Dukes and the Toronto Network
The presence of Frank Dukes is particularly significant in retrospect. He would become a major producer and songwriter, working across hip-hop and pop, but his connection with BADBADNOTGOOD belongs to the same Toronto ecosystem that allowed boundaries between instrumental music and production culture to remain unusually permeable.
The relationship reinforces a point already visible throughout the band’s story:
BADBADNOTGOOD did not become connected with hip-hop because a record company decided jazz needed younger consumers.
The connections were built socially.
Musicians knew producers.
Producers knew rappers.
Sessions led to other sessions.
Internet attention accelerated relationships that already made musical sense.
Toronto was not simply the city printed beneath the band’s name.
It was part of the mechanism.
III Was a Beginning, Not a Monument
This is where the old JazzLatitude article lost perspective. It treated III as a nearly untouchable endpoint—an “immortal” reference whose production and performance supposedly represented some absolute standard.
The historical record suggests something more interesting.
III was transitional.
It proved BADBADNOTGOOD could write a compelling album without relying on covers.
It established a stronger recorded identity.
It demonstrated how lessons from hip-hop production could influence instrumental composition.
And it prepared the group for collaborations in which the relationship between band and rapper would become much more sophisticated.
The most important of those was already approaching.
Ghostface Killah Changes the Question
By the time III appeared, BADBADNOTGOOD was working on music that would become Sour Soul, the 2015 collaborative album with Ghostface Killah.
The project changed the fundamental question surrounding the band.
Earlier, listeners asked:
What happens when jazz musicians play hip-hop?
Sour Soul suggested something better:
What happens when an instrumental band understands hip-hop well enough to build original music for one of its great rappers?
That distinction would move BADBADNOTGOOD beyond the novelty of reinterpretation and into another tradition entirely—the tradition of the studio band, the producer, the soul rhythm section and the musicians whose job is to construct a world in which a vocalist or rapper can operate.
It would also force the group to confront something jazz education rarely emphasizes:
Sometimes the most effective improvisational decision is knowing when not to improvise at all.
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Sour Soul: From Covering Hip-Hop to Building It
Sour Soul changed the meaning of BADBADNOTGOOD’s relationship with hip-hop. Released in February 2015 as a collaboration with Ghostface Killah, the album was not built around the premise of a jazz trio performing rap songs after they had already been produced. BADBADNOTGOOD, working closely with producer Frank Dukes, helped construct original instrumental environments over which Ghostface could rap. The conceptual direction drew deliberately from the sound of 1960s and 1970s soul and soundtrack music rather than from a conventional jazz-rap template. The project also included appearances from Danny Brown, MF DOOM, Elzhi and Tree, reinforcing the sense that the band had moved from observing hip-hop culture to participating directly in record-making within it. (lexrecords.com)
That transition matters more than any claim that BADBADNOTGOOD somehow “fused” jazz and hip-hop. Sour Soul required a different discipline. A rap performance needs space. If every musician reacts constantly, the instrumental arrangement can compete with the voice. If harmony changes too frequently, the rapper’s phrasing can lose its foundation. If a drummer treats every bar as an invitation to display technique, the groove stops functioning as architecture. The musicians therefore had to suppress some of the habits rewarded in jazz performance. Their job was not to demonstrate that they could improvise over Ghostface Killah. Their job was to make music in which Ghostface Killah sounded inevitable.
This is one of the clearest signs of BADBADNOTGOOD’s maturation.
Ghostface Killah and the Discipline of Space
Ghostface brought a vocal presence that could dominate almost any arrangement. His dense storytelling, unusual rhythmic placement and highly expressive tone had developed across decades of Wu-Tang Clan recordings and solo work. BADBADNOTGOOD did not need to make the background equally busy.
Instead, the instrumental music often works through strong motifs, restrained harmonic movement and carefully controlled texture.
That approach connects Sour Soul with older soul production traditions in which the rhythm section establishes an environment and the vocalist occupies it. The band’s jazz training remains relevant, but it is embedded in decisions about voicing, timing and arrangement rather than displayed continuously through solos.
This is an important lesson in musicianship.
Complexity does not disappear when fewer notes are played.
Sometimes it moves into placement.
The Shadow of Soul and Soundtrack Music
Sour Soul also demonstrated how deeply BADBADNOTGOOD had begun thinking about recorded atmosphere. The album’s instrumental world evokes vintage soul, psychedelic textures and cinematic scoring without functioning as a simple period recreation.
That distinction is important.
Retro production can easily become costume. Add tape saturation, a few reverberant drums and an old keyboard, and a record can signal “1970s” without understanding why those sounds worked.
BADBADNOTGOOD and Frank Dukes were more interested in structure.
Bass lines create tension.
Drums establish weight without excessive ornament.
Keyboards and guitars can provide color rather than constant harmonic information.
Horn and string textures appear when the arrangement needs additional scale.
The result makes Sour Soul feel related to another era without pretending it was recorded in one.
From Sour Soul to IV
The band’s next major statement, IV, arrived in 2016. By this point, BADBADNOTGOOD was no longer operating simply as the original piano-bass-drums trio. Leland Whitty, whose saxophone had appeared with the group earlier, became an increasingly important part of the ensemble and expanded its compositional possibilities.
The album also brought a striking group of collaborators into the band’s world, including Sam Herring, Colin Stetson, Mick Jenkins, Charlotte Day Wilson and Kaytranada. (innovativeleisure.net)
The guest list is revealing because it does not point toward one genre.
Herring arrives from an indie-rock context.
Mick Jenkins brings rap.
Charlotte Day Wilson contributes a distinctive contemporary R&B sensibility.
Kaytranada represents another crucial part of modern Canadian beat and dance culture.
Stetson brings an experimental saxophone language radically different from conventional jazz guest soloing.
BADBADNOTGOOD had become a meeting point.
“Time Moves Slow”
Of all the songs associated with IV, “Time Moves Slow”, featuring Sam Herring, became one of the band’s most enduring.
Its appeal illustrates how far BADBADNOTGOOD had traveled from the hyperactive image of the early Odd Future sessions.
The song does not depend on instrumental virtuosity.
It depends on atmosphere.
A patient groove establishes the foundation. Herring’s vocal performance carries emotional weight without requiring the band to compete for attention. Harmonic and textural details accumulate around the song rather than constantly redirecting it.
This is the kind of recording that reveals how much the musicians had learned from accompaniment.
The band could now make itself smaller.
That was growth.
“Lavender” and Kaytranada
The relationship with Kaytranada offered another perspective on the group’s rhythmic development. Both artists emerged from Canadian environments in which hip-hop, electronic production, R&B and dance music could overlap naturally.
When a live band collaborates with a producer such as Kaytranada, the most interesting question is not whether human performance is superior to programmed rhythm.
It is what each can learn from the other.
A producer can control microtiming, texture and repetition with extraordinary precision. A live rhythm section can alter those relationships spontaneously. BADBADNOTGOOD’s development increasingly involved treating these as complementary possibilities.
The groove does not have to choose between “live” and “produced.”
It can contain ideas from both.
Leland Whitty Changes the Geometry
The growing role of Leland Whitty changed BADBADNOTGOOD more profoundly than simply adding saxophone to the instrumentation.
A trio has a particular geometry.
Piano or keyboards occupy harmony and melody.
Bass establishes the low register.
Drums organize rhythm.
Add a horn and those responsibilities shift.
The keyboard no longer needs to carry every melodic statement. Counterpoint becomes easier. Arrangements can create foreground and background relationships that were difficult with three musicians. A saxophone can function as melody, texture, section voice or improvisational lead.
Whitty also brought additional instrumental and arranging abilities to the group.
BADBADNOTGOOD was becoming less identifiable as a jazz trio and more as a compositional ensemble.
That transformation would become crucial later.
The Problem With Being Called Jazz
By the middle of the 2010s, BADBADNOTGOOD had developed an unusual relationship with the word jazz.
Jazz had provided essential training and vocabulary.
It also provided much of the media framework through which the band was initially discussed.
Yet the label could become restrictive.
If Sour Soul is judged primarily as jazz, its restraint might appear to contain less improvisational ambition than the band’s earlier work. If judged as a hip-hop record with an original instrumental score, the same decisions become strengths.
Likewise, IV contains enough different musical languages that forcing every track back into jazz terminology can obscure what the band is actually doing.
This does not mean BADBADNOTGOOD “left jazz.”
The more useful interpretation is that jazz stopped functioning as the border around the music.
It became one of the resources inside it.
Sampling Comes Full Circle
There is an elegant reversal in BADBADNOTGOOD’s relationship with hip-hop.
The band initially gained attention by taking music associated with rappers and converting it into live instrumental performance.
Eventually, producers began sampling BADBADNOTGOOD recordings.
The direction of influence reversed.
This matters because sampling changes the status of an instrumental recording. A track is no longer only a finished composition. It can become raw material for another producer’s work.
For musicians who had grown up listening to sample-based hip-hop, entering that cycle was significant.
They had begun by learning from producers.
Now producers could learn from—or literally build with—them.
The relationship had become reciprocal.
Production as Musicianship
This also helps explain why BADBADNOTGOOD should not be evaluated only through instrumental technique.
The group increasingly developed a producer’s understanding of music.
Where should the bass sit?
How long should a figure repeat?
What kind of drum sound gives a composition its physical identity?
When does a texture need to disappear?
How much information does a vocalist need behind them?
What happens when an arrangement is heard through headphones rather than onstage?
These are compositional questions, even when they do not appear on conventional notation.
The studio had become another ensemble member.
Matthew Tavares Steps Away
One of the most important transitions in BADBADNOTGOOD’s history involved Matthew Tavares, whose keyboards and compositional contributions had been fundamental to the group’s early identity.
By the late 2010s, Tavares stepped away from touring and eventually from the band’s regular lineup, while continuing his own creative work. BADBADNOTGOOD subsequently developed primarily around Alexander Sowinski, Chester Hansen and Leland Whitty.
Personnel changes are especially significant for a group whose identity formed through close friendship.
Replacing one musician with another is not simply a technical operation.
The chemistry changes.
The compositional process changes.
The balance of personalities changes.
BADBADNOTGOOD therefore faced a question similar to many long-running ensembles:
Was the band a specific lineup, or had the name come to represent a broader musical method?
The recordings that followed began answering that question.
A Period of Recalibration
After IV, BADBADNOTGOOD did not rush into another conventional album cycle.
This slower period allowed the group to reconsider what it wanted to sound like without the original trio configuration remaining unchanged.
That was probably necessary.
The early band had developed under unusually rapid conditions: internet discovery, Odd Future attention, international touring, hip-hop collaborations, III, Sour Soul and IV had all arrived within a relatively compressed period.
Success can produce momentum.
Momentum can also prevent reflection.
The next major studio album would sound noticeably different.
Talk Memory: Looking Backward to Move Somewhere Else
Released in 2021, Talk Memory represented a significant shift. The record was more explicitly instrumental and expansive than much of IV, with compositions that allowed the ensemble to stretch beyond compact song structures.
But describing it simply as a “return to jazz” would be misleading.
The musicians who made Talk Memory were not the Humber College students of a decade earlier. They had spent years learning from hip-hop production, soul arrangements, vocal accompaniment, electronic textures and studio collaboration.
Those experiences did not disappear because the music became more instrumental.
They changed how instrumental music could be organized.
The album also included contributions from a remarkable group of collaborators, including Karriem Riggins, Laraaji and Arthur Verocai, among others. (badbadnotgood.com)
The presence of Verocai was particularly meaningful.
Arthur Verocai and Orchestral Memory
Brazilian composer and arranger Arthur Verocai occupies a distinctive place in the history connecting jazz, Brazilian popular music and hip-hop. His self-titled 1972 album became a cult recording decades after its original release, admired particularly for its orchestration and eventually rediscovered by producers and record collectors.
BADBADNOTGOOD’s relationship with Verocai therefore makes historical sense.
Here was a Brazilian arranger whose work had traveled through time partly because sample culture created new audiences for forgotten recordings.
BADBADNOTGOOD represented another generation shaped by that culture.
Verocai contributed orchestral arrangements to Talk Memory, bringing strings into the group’s music not as generic cinematic decoration but through the sensibility of an arranger with a highly recognizable relationship to texture and harmony. (badbadnotgood.com)
The collaboration created an unusual historical loop.
Brazilian orchestral music influenced record collectors and producers.
Hip-hop reshaped how younger musicians listened to records.
Those musicians formed BADBADNOTGOOD.
Then they invited Verocai into their own album.
Musical history rarely moves in straight lines.
“Signal From the Noise”
The long-form “Signal From the Noise” immediately demonstrated that Talk Memory was operating on another scale.
Produced with Floating Points, the piece develops gradually through repetition, tension and increasingly dense instrumental interaction. The collaboration makes sense because Floating Points has similarly moved between electronic composition, dance music and improvisational contexts.
The track is not simply BADBADNOTGOOD returning to jazz improvisation.
It sounds like musicians who have absorbed a decade of studio experience applying that knowledge to extended instrumental form.
Repetition is structural.
Texture evolves patiently.
The ensemble can build intensity without requiring a verse-chorus song architecture.
The lesson learned from beats remains present even when there is no rapper.
“Beside April”
“Beside April” reveals another side of the record. Orchestral textures interact with the core ensemble in a composition where atmosphere and arrangement matter as much as improvisational display.
This is where Verocai’s presence becomes especially relevant.
Strings can easily become shorthand for sophistication. BADBADNOTGOOD had already spent years avoiding similarly superficial genre signals.
The stronger moments on Talk Memory use orchestration to alter the emotional and structural shape of the compositions.
The band sounds larger.
But more importantly, it thinks differently because it is larger.
From Internet Trio to Arrangement Laboratory
By Talk Memory, the transformation was substantial.
The early BADBADNOTGOOD had attracted attention partly through the immediacy of three musicians in a room turning hip-hop into live instrumental performance.
A decade later, the group could function almost like an arrangement laboratory.
Strings.
Additional percussion.
Guest instrumentalists.
Studio processing.
Extended compositions.
Collaborative production.
The core identity had become less dependent on one instrumentation.
This is why describing BADBADNOTGOOD as simply a “jazz trio that plays hip-hop” became increasingly inaccurate.
The band had moved beyond the sentence that originally made it easy to explain.
That is usually a healthy sign.
The Influence Runs in Several Directions
BADBADNOTGOOD’s career is especially useful because it disrupts a common narrative about genre exchange.
The simple version says:
Jazz influenced hip-hop.
Then:
Hip-hop influenced BADBADNOTGOOD.
The actual network is more complex.
Jazz records were sampled by hip-hop producers.
Those producers influenced young instrumentalists.
The instrumentalists began collaborating with rappers.
Their recordings became sample sources.
Brazilian music rediscovered through hip-hop entered their orchestral vocabulary through Arthur Verocai.
Electronic producers such as Floating Points entered their extended instrumental work.
The arrows point everywhere.
That is a much better model for contemporary music.
What Talk Memory Proved
Talk Memory demonstrated that BADBADNOTGOOD could survive both the novelty of its early success and a major change in personnel.
It also showed that the band’s relationship with hip-hop had become deeper than obvious stylistic markers.
There did not need to be a rapper.
There did not need to be a recognizable cover.
There did not even need to be a conventional beat.
Hip-hop had influenced how the musicians thought about repetition, recording, bass, texture and collaboration.
Once those ideas become part of musical thinking, they do not disappear when the surface style changes.
This is why Talk Memory should not be heard as BADBADNOTGOOD abandoning hip-hop and returning to jazz.
It is the sound of musicians discovering that the distinction had become less useful.
Toward Mid Spiral
The next stage would make that point even clearer.
In 2024, BADBADNOTGOOD released music under the Mid Spiral title, initially appearing as three interconnected projects—Chaos, Order and Growth—before being assembled into a larger album statement. The music emphasized the core ensemble while drawing on a wide network of collaborators and the accumulated experience of the preceding decade.
The titles themselves suggest a useful framework.
Chaos.
Order.
Growth.
Those three ideas could describe BADBADNOTGOOD’s entire career.
The chaos of the early basement videos.
The increasing discipline of original composition and production.
And the growth that allowed the band to become something much broader than the category that first made it famous.
By this point, the question was no longer whether jazz could coexist with hip-hop.
BADBADNOTGOOD had answered that years earlier.
The more interesting question was what remained of those categories after musicians had spent more than a decade moving freely between them.
Mid Spiral: The Band After the Breakthrough Years
By the time BADBADNOTGOOD released the music that became Mid Spiral in 2024, the group no longer needed to prove that jazz musicians could understand hip-hop. That argument belonged to an earlier stage of their career. Sour Soul had already demonstrated that they could build original environments for a rapper. IV had expanded the possibilities of collaboration. Talk Memory had shown that the band could return to extended instrumental composition without pretending the previous decade had never happened. Mid Spiral therefore arrived at an interesting point: BADBADNOTGOOD could finally be heard less as a symbol of genre crossover and more simply as an ensemble.
The project first appeared through three releases—Mid Spiral: Chaos, Mid Spiral: Order and Mid Spiral: Growth—before being assembled into the full Mid Spiral album. The recordings involved the core of Alexander Sowinski, Chester Hansen and Leland Whitty alongside musicians including Kaelin Ellis, Tyler Lott, Juancarlos Medrano, Felix Pastorius and others. The group’s official presentation describes the sessions as emerging from a period of experimentation in which the musicians returned to playing together in the studio without a rigid predetermined concept.
That looseness is important.
The early band had become famous by disrupting expectations.
The mature band no longer needed disruption itself to be the subject.
Chaos, Order and Growth
The three-part organization of Mid Spiral provides a useful way of hearing BADBADNOTGOOD’s development.
Chaos emphasizes movement and possibility. Ideas seem capable of changing direction quickly. The musicians sound interested in what happens when interaction leads the composition rather than simply executing a predetermined structure.
Order suggests the opposite impulse: organization, repetition, arrangement and the discipline required to make collective ideas coherent.
Growth completes the sequence by implying that neither chaos nor order is sufficient alone. Musical development requires both experimentation and selection.
The titles should not be treated as a strict philosophical system, but they fit the band’s history unusually well.
BADBADNOTGOOD’s earliest performances benefited from youthful disorder. Their later records became increasingly sophisticated because the musicians learned how to control it.
A Different Kind of Virtuosity
BADBADNOTGOOD has always contained highly capable instrumentalists, but virtuosity in this band rarely functions as a continuous display of speed or harmonic complexity.
The more interesting virtuosity is collective judgment.
Knowing when a bass figure should repeat.
Knowing when the drummer should leave space.
Knowing whether a keyboard texture needs to remain for eight bars or disappear after two.
Knowing when a saxophone should become the lead voice and when it should become part of the background.
These decisions are difficult to measure, which is one reason discussions of musicianship can overemphasize technique that is easily described.
But BADBADNOTGOOD’s evolution depends on them.
The young trio could attract attention through intensity.
The mature ensemble can sustain attention through proportion.
The Importance of Chester Hansen
Chester Hansen is central to the band’s identity because bass occupies an unusually important structural position in BADBADNOTGOOD’s music.
Hip-hop helped teach an entire generation of listeners to experience low frequencies not merely as harmonic support but as physical architecture. Hansen’s playing reflects that awareness without simply imitating programmed bass.
His lines can be repetitive without becoming static.
They can establish the identity of a composition before melody arrives.
They can function almost like loops while remaining responsive to the musicians around them.
This relationship between repetition and interaction is one of the places where the band’s jazz and hip-hop histories become difficult to separate.
The bassist listens like an improviser.
The line can behave like production.
Alexander Sowinski and the Beat
The same is true of Alexander Sowinski.
A jazz drummer approaching hip-hop superficially might simply play backbeats while adding improvisational decoration. Sowinski’s role has been more fundamental. His playing often treats the beat itself as the central compositional object.
Where does the snare sit?
How heavy should the kick feel?
How much variation can occur before the groove loses its identity?
What happens when a pattern associated with programmed music is performed by a musician capable of altering microtiming continuously?
These questions were already present in the Odd Future sessions.
Years later, they remain part of the band’s rhythmic DNA.
Sowinski’s significance is not that he makes jazz drumming sound like a drum machine.
It is that he understands why a drum machine can be musically compelling.
Leland Whitty and the Expansion of the Band
Leland Whitty helped transform BADBADNOTGOOD from a trio-centered concept into something broader.
His saxophone provided another improvisational voice, but his importance extends into composition, guitar, keyboards and arrangement. As the band’s records became more layered, these additional capabilities helped expand what BADBADNOTGOOD could construct without losing its internal identity.
The difference is especially clear when comparing the basement performances of the early 2010s with Talk Memory or Mid Spiral.
The early sound can often be understood by watching three musicians interact.
The later sound may require thinking about orchestration, overdubbing, studio arrangement and multiple instrumental roles.
Whitty helped make that transition possible.
What Was Lost When Matthew Tavares Left?
The evolution should not be described as though every change automatically improved the band.
Matthew Tavares was fundamental to BADBADNOTGOOD’s formation and early musical personality. His keyboard playing and compositional perspective shaped the records through the period in which the group developed its international identity.
When a founding musician steps away, something disappears.
That is unavoidable.
The later band does not sound exactly like the early trio because it cannot.
The useful question is not whether one era is objectively superior.
It is whether the ensemble found enough new possibilities to justify continuing under the same name.
Talk Memory and Mid Spiral provide strong evidence that it did.
The identity changed.
It did not become empty.
BADBADNOTGOOD and the Myth of the Jazz Rebellion
The band’s early history is often packaged as a rebellion against conservative jazz education.
There is some truth behind the friction, but the story becomes misleading when exaggerated.
BADBADNOTGOOD could challenge conventions precisely because its members had learned enough musical language to make informed choices about what they wanted to keep and what they wanted to reject.
Their story is therefore not evidence that jazz education is useless.
It suggests something more nuanced.
Education becomes limiting when technique is mistaken for taste.
Knowing how bebop harmony works does not require a musician to spend an entire career reproducing bebop.
Learning standards does not prevent someone from studying MF DOOM.
Understanding acoustic jazz rhythm does not prohibit learning from J Dilla.
Musical education is most valuable when it expands choices.
BADBADNOTGOOD used those choices differently from what some people expected.
J Dilla Without Imitating J Dilla
The influence of J Dilla is worth isolating because his importance to musicians far beyond hip-hop is now difficult to overstate.
Dilla’s rhythmic language changed how producers and instrumentalists thought about timing. The relationships among kick, snare, samples and bass could feel deliberately displaced without losing groove.
For live musicians, this created fascinating problems.
A drummer cannot simply “play behind the beat” and become Dilla.
The relationships are more subtle.
BADBADNOTGOOD belongs to a generation of instrumentalists for whom these production ideas became part of rhythmic education alongside traditional jazz concepts.
This does not make the band an imitation of Dilla.
It means the definition of rhythmic literacy expanded.
From Samples to Sample Sources
One of the clearest signs of BADBADNOTGOOD’s integration into hip-hop culture is that their own recordings became useful to producers.
This closes a historical circle.
Jazz recordings helped supply the raw material of sample-based hip-hop.
BADBADNOTGOOD grew up listening to music shaped by that process.
They then transformed hip-hop compositions into instrumental performances.
Eventually, their instrumental music entered the production ecosystem itself.
At that point, asking whether the music is fundamentally “jazz” or “hip-hop” becomes less interesting than tracing what happens to sound as it moves between musicians, records and generations.
A recording does not have to remain what its creators intended.
Someone else can hear another possibility inside it.
Hip-hop taught listeners that lesson particularly well.
Why BADBADNOTGOOD Reached Beyond Jazz Audiences
The band’s success cannot be explained solely by musical innovation.
Context mattered enormously.
Their rise coincided with a period in which YouTube, blogs and social platforms could move music between communities without traditional genre gatekeepers controlling every stage of discovery.
A listener watching Tyler, the Creator could encounter BADBADNOTGOOD without visiting a jazz publication.
Someone following Ghostface Killah could discover Sour Soul.
A Kaytranada listener could reach IV.
Someone interested in Arthur Verocai could arrive through Talk Memory.
Each collaboration created another entrance.
This networked form of discovery suited BADBADNOTGOOD perfectly because the band’s music was already networked.
The Toronto Factor
Toronto deserves more attention in this story.
BADBADNOTGOOD emerged during a period in which the city was becoming increasingly visible internationally through hip-hop, R&B and electronic music. The group’s connections with producers and artists were not incidental to that environment.
Toronto’s musical identity has long been shaped by immigration, Caribbean culture, American media, electronic music, indie rock, jazz and a complex local hip-hop history.
BADBADNOTGOOD absorbed a city in which musical categories were already overlapping.
Their Toronto identity is therefore different from the West Coast Get Down’s relationship with Los Angeles, but the comparison is useful.
Both demonstrate how contemporary jazz-adjacent music can grow from local ecosystems rather than genre institutions alone.
BADBADNOTGOOD and Kamasi Washington: Two Different Routes
BADBADNOTGOOD and Kamasi Washington became prominent during roughly the same broader period, and both attracted listeners who did not necessarily identify as traditional jazz audiences.
Yet they did so through almost opposite strategies.
Washington embraced scale.
Choirs.
Strings.
Long compositions.
Large ensembles.
The spiritual jazz tradition.
BADBADNOTGOOD initially worked through compression.
Beats.
Small ensembles.
Internet videos.
Hip-hop repertoire.
Studio atmosphere.
Washington’s The Epic announced magnitude.
BADBADNOTGOOD often made its point by showing how much could happen inside a groove.
The comparison demonstrates why claims about a single “jazz revival” of the 2010s are inadequate.
There was no one revival.
There were multiple communities finding new audiences through different routes.
Arthur Verocai and the Value of Looking Backward
The collaboration with Arthur Verocai on Talk Memory also reveals another important dimension of the band’s listening culture.
Hip-hop encouraged younger listeners to investigate the records behind samples.
That process frequently crossed national borders and historical periods.
Brazilian music became especially important within record-collecting and beat-making communities, and Verocai’s 1972 album is one of the clearest examples of a recording whose international reputation expanded dramatically decades after its original release.
BADBADNOTGOOD did not treat that history as an exotic reference.
They invited Verocai into the work.
That distinction matters.
Influence became collaboration.
What the Band Did Not Invent
A fair assessment requires resisting several tempting exaggerations.
BADBADNOTGOOD did not invent jazz-rap.
They did not invent instrumental hip-hop.
They did not discover that jazz musicians could play contemporary popular songs.
They did not single-handedly make jazz relevant to young listeners.
They did not invent analog recording, genre hybridity or the use of repetition in improvisational music.
Their importance lies somewhere more precise.
They made the musical instincts of a particular generation unusually visible.
Hip-hop was not outside jazz waiting to be imported.
Production was not inferior to instrumental performance.
YouTube was not less legitimate than a jazz club as a place of discovery.
A cover could be serious musical investigation.
A jazz-trained musician could learn from a beatmaker.
And a band could change its identity repeatedly without needing to announce that it had changed genres.
Where to Start Listening
For listeners new to BADBADNOTGOOD, beginning chronologically is useful but not essential.
BBNG2 captures the excitement of the early period, when covers and original material were still interacting directly.
III is the clearest point at which the band establishes an original compositional identity without depending on recognizable covers.
Sour Soul demonstrates how effectively the musicians could build a complete environment around a rapper.
IV shows the group opening toward vocalists, producers and a wider collaborative network.
Talk Memory reveals the mature instrumental ensemble and its expanded approach to orchestration.
Mid Spiral shows what remains after the original narrative of “young jazz musicians playing hip-hop” has become irrelevant.
Taken together, these recordings describe evolution rather than a single breakthrough.
Why III Still Matters
The old version of this JazzLatitude article made the mistake of turning III into a monument.
We do not need to do that.
Its importance becomes clearer when the exaggeration is removed.
III is the album where BADBADNOTGOOD demonstrated that the ideas discovered through covers could generate original composition.
That is enough to make it historically important within the band’s development.
The groove-centered thinking remained.
The production awareness remained.
The willingness to repeat remained.
The refusal to treat jazz virtuosity as the only measure of musical sophistication remained.
But the borrowed songs disappeared.
The band had to stand on its own.
It did.
From III to Mid Spiral
Seen from 2024 rather than 2014, III looks less like a destination and more like a hinge.
On one side is the young Toronto trio attracting internet attention by transforming hip-hop tracks into live performances.
On the other is a group capable of working with Ghostface Killah, Sam Herring, Kaytranada, Arthur Verocai, Floating Points and a long list of musicians from different traditions while still retaining an identifiable character.
That trajectory is more impressive than declaring any single record an “immortal masterpiece.”
It demonstrates adaptation.
BADBADNOTGOOD survived the context that made the band famous.
Many artists do not.
The Importance of Curiosity
Perhaps the most consistent element across BADBADNOTGOOD’s career is not jazz or hip-hop.
It is curiosity.
Curiosity led jazz students toward Odd Future.
It led a trio from covers toward original composition.
It led instrumentalists into collaboration with Ghostface Killah.
It opened the group toward singers and electronic producers.
It eventually connected Toronto musicians with Arthur Verocai.
And it allowed a band whose identity seemed inseparable from youth culture in 2011 to continue developing more than a decade later.
Curiosity is difficult to market as a genre.
That may be why it has served them so well.
Final Thoughts: After Jazz Meets Hip-Hop
The phrase “jazz meets hip-hop” is useful when someone needs to understand BADBADNOTGOOD in a few seconds.
After that, it should probably be discarded.
The band’s history is much more interesting.
Matthew Tavares, Chester Hansen and Alexander Sowinski met inside jazz education but listened beyond its institutional boundaries. Their Odd Future performances found an audience through the internet. Tyler, the Creator helped accelerate that exposure. The first records transformed hip-hop and other contemporary material through live performance. III proved that the band’s emerging language could support original composition. Sour Soul reversed the relationship by making BADBADNOTGOOD part of the machinery of a hip-hop record. IV expanded the collaborative possibilities. The departure of Tavares forced the group to reconsider its identity. Leland Whitty became central to an increasingly compositional and multi-instrumental ensemble. Talk Memory brought Arthur Verocai and other collaborators into a broader instrumental world. Mid Spiral demonstrated that the group could continue after the crossover narrative had lost its novelty.
BADBADNOTGOOD did not resolve the relationship between jazz and hip-hop.
There was nothing to resolve.
The traditions had been communicating for decades.
What the band demonstrated was what happens when musicians grow up after that conversation has already begun.
They do not need to introduce the participants.
They can simply continue the discussion.
And sometimes the most important change in music occurs exactly that way—not when someone invents a new language, but when a younger generation becomes fluent enough in several existing ones that it no longer remembers why they were supposed to remain separate.