Kassa Overall
New York, NY
Grant amount: $15,000
Performances
Jorgensen Concert Hall, Snow College. Ephraim, UT. 2/10/22
Barboza. Seattle, WA. 2/13/2022
Hult Center for the Performing Arts. Eugene, OR. 2/14/2022
The New Parish. Oakland, CA. 2/17/2022
About the Artist
Kassa Overall is a musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer, a product of New York City’s jazz scene who melds avant-garde experimentation with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and hip-hop in unmapped directions, reflecting a panoramic musical background from West Coast G-Funk to the sounds of the New York underground. Whatever the experiment, Overall remains faithful to the pocket of jazz drums in the tradition of his mentors, Elvin Jones, Billy Higgins, and Billy Hart, with whom he studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In the past two years, Overall has released four critically acclaimed projects: Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz (2019), I THINK I’M GOOD (February 2020), followed by SHADES OF FLU (May 2020) and SHADES OF FLU 2 (April 2021), pandemic mixtapes loosely inspired by Madlib’s Shades of Blue.