Sunrise Over Brooklyn

Revisiting an avant-garde jazz masterpiece by El-P and the Blue Series Continuum from 2003

It’s the peak of summer, and I’ve just moved back to Hamburg. I’m broke and in my mid-20s, hustling as a freelance writer while trying to finish my law degrees, but distracted by spending an unhealthy amount of hours at the bars of my neighborhood, a working class area close to the city’s red light district.

My nights out often end at Golden Pudel Club, a wooden shack at the riverfront, where indie slackers and graffiti writers mingle with punks and squatters, dance to strange electronic music and smoke strong Moroccan hash purchased on the big stairwell leading down to the harbor area.

We often spend our after-hours in a nearby park underneath plastic palm trees, overlooking the Elbe river while the sun comes up behind the dockyard cranes and the freight ships – hoodie up, rolling another cigarette, taking another sip from the last bottle before finally heading home.

from the “Sunrise Over Brooklyn” sleeve, Thirsty Ear 2003

What made me think of those hazy summer mornings just now is “Sunrise Over Brooklyn”, an instrumental tune by the hip-hop producer El-P – known today as one half of Run The Jewels – featuring the Blue Series Continuum, a group of free jazz musicians around pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker.

Released first in August 2003 on a one-sided ten-inch vinyl, the ten-and-a-half minute track was later included on their collaborative album High Water (2004). I’ve not listened to the full album often, though I’m sure it’s a great body of work – but I’d loved “Sunrise Over Brooklyn” so much and could never help viewing it as a stand-alone piece.

Just as an illustration of what a massive fan of both El-P and his early group Company Flow I was: When I was about to get married for the first time, my friends took me out to an abandoned building, where we’d be writing graffiti, drinking beer and listening to Co-Flow’s Funcrusher Plus (1997) all day – they nailed my idea of a perfect bachelor party.

El’s fans – including myself – strongly identified with his idiosyncratic take on hip-hop and his independent ethos, which stood in stark opposition to the popular rap on MTV and Hot 97. His music never resembled mainstream 1990s aesthetics much; from the very beginning, his vision was a twisted, dystopian take on the sound of formative 1980s groups such as Run-D.M.C. and Public Enemy – but instead of James Brown and Parliament, he’d sample Vangelis and Philip Glass.

Born Jaime Meline, El-P spent the first decade of his career in New York City’s underground hip-hop scene, shaping the nascent indie rap movement with his influential trio Company Flow, which included MC Bigg Jus and DJ Mr. Len. After Bigg Jus left the group, El and Len went on to produce a sophomore album as a duo, and to many fans’ surprise – and possibly disappointment –, Little Johnny From The Hospitul (1999) turned out to be an instrumental record. The band dissolved at the end of the decade, together with huge parts of said scene.

Both Co-Flow albums had been released on Rawkus, one of the most important independent hip-hop labels of that fertile period. When Rawkus started flirting with the mainstream, El-P decided to launch his own label Def(initive) Jux. He went on to produce an outstanding debut album for Harlem rap duo Cannibal Ox and write the soundtrack for the indie film Bomb The System, which was set in the Big Apple’s graffiti scene; he’d perfect his early style on his solo debut Fantastic Damage, released on Def Jux in 2002.

When “Sunrise Over Brooklyn” landed a good year later, I was still flabbergasted. Even if El was already known for his experimental take on hip-hop and for not fulfilling expectations, nobody expected an instrumental jazz record from him at this point.

Now of course there had been strong cross-pollination between the two genres throughout the 1990s, from Ron Carter playing with A Tribe Called Quest to DJ Premier working with Branford Marsalis, from the freestyle scats performed at L.A.’s Project Blowed to the jazzy breakbeats released on UK labels Mo’ Wax and Ninja Tune.

In that same spirit of creative exchange between the scenes, El-P was approached by a collective of New York free jazz musicians around the experienced players Matthew Shipp and William Parker in the early 2000s. They were keen on him to produce an album in their Blue Series for the Thirsty Ear label.

As El remembers on a podcast with Open Mike Eagle, he wasn’t too sure about the project at first. He also misunderstood the task, as he thought it was just about making a track for a compilation. Only by the time he’d made up his mind and accepted the challenge, he realized what he’d thrown himself into – he was actually expected to produce a full-length record.

El contemplated what he might contribute to an acoustic jazz album and came up with two strategies. One, he’d produce some rough beats for the jazz musicians to improvise over in the studio. Two, he’d call his father, a seasoned jazz pianist and singer (who went by the stage name of Harry Keys), and ask him to pick some standards that he’d bring to Shipp’s and Parker’s group to play.

When El showed up at the studio handing out sheet music, the seasoned jazz musicians weren’t too happy. Coming from the world of free improvised music, they hadn’t played standards in decades. There was a bit of grumbling, but just like El, they too accepted the challenge. His idea was to push them outside of their comfort zone; for those free-spirited players, that could mean confining them to a more rigid, traditional framework.

Though the project is mainly credited to him as an artist, El’s presence on “Sunrise Over Brooklyn” feels quite subtle. He’s not doing what boom-bap producers like DJ Premier, Pete Rock or Q-Tip had been doing in their earlier explorations of combining hip-hop with jazz. Instead, he’s going for the role of a Manfred Eicher, Rick Rubin or Brian Eno type producer.

Previous records aiming at reconnecting hip-hop with its jazz roots had often relied on MCs rapping over live instrumentation (see: Guru’s Jazzmatazz, Freestyle Fellowship, The Roots) or recording bespoke samples to build jazzy hip-hop beats (see: Digable Planets, Buckshot LeFonque’s debut album). But that’s not what happened here. What we got instead is not so much a fusion of aesthetics, but one of processes.

Formally as well as stylistically, “Sunrise” is a jazz tune, written and orchestrated by a hip-hop producer. The bulk of the music is just the band improvising on a pre-written harmonic and melodic idea. Even the drum track was apparently played live – this doesn’t seem to be one of the tracks using El’s programmed pre-production. Jazz drummer Guillermo E. Brown, a frequent collaborator of Shipp’s, is credited on the sleeve.

While many 1990s “jazz rap” experiments sound very much of their time, “Sunrise” remains a timeless piece of instrumental music. After a moody trumpet and saxophone intro, the piano introduces the harmonic theme, playing chords in the left and melody in the right hand; the reedists and the piano start improvising over each other, while drums and bass lead the tune into a slow, fragile crescendo, and subtle synths create a dystopian atmosphere resembling daybreak over El-P’s home borough.

from the “Sunrise Over Brooklyn” sleeve, Thirsty Ear 2003

A good two decades later, I'm rinsing billy woods’ brilliant GOLLIWOG album, and there’s a track on it, “Corinthians”, that was actually produced by El-P and features a verse from New York indie rapper Despot, who was signed to Def Jux back in the days. That line of reference sends me on a little 2000s indie rap bender, and that’s how I end up returning to “Sunrise Over Brooklyn”.

Back in 2003, I’d never even been to Brooklyn, so I’d never seen the sun rise over that borough. But I’ve always found it fascinating how we attach individual memories and images to music, depending on situations we’ve encountered a piece in.

I’m not exactly obsessed with the past, and I don’t wish to turn back time, but hearing this tune vividly evokes scenes from more than 20 years ago that’s I’d almost forgotten about, had they not been as deeply engrained in this music for me.