Jazzmatazz (Volume 1)

Guru of Gang Starr recruited Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, Branford Marsalis, MC Solaar, and Lonnie Liston Smith for Jazzmatazz Volume 1 (1993) — the first record to put hip-hop and jazz musicians in the same room rather than sampling one over the other. A Tribe Called Quest had hired Ron Carter the year before for “Verses from the Abstract,” but that was a studio session; Jazzmatazz is a concept, an argument made at the level of the album.

Donald Byrd was on Blue Note alongside Dolphy and Grant Green — the same crate-digger catalogue that Pete Rock, Q-Tip, and their generation were working through. Roy Ayers covered Gabor Szabo’s compositions. The record is an explicit acknowledgment of what the jazz records mean to hip-hop production: not a separate interest, but the source water. Guru’s insight was to make that relationship audible rather than just implicit — to have the original musicians in the room with the rapper, rather than sampled into a track.