Lil Jabba Footworks Out of Bounds

Photos by Rachel Rinehart

Last time I really kicked it with Lil Jabba was one chilly night last fall, eating Chinese food and blowing kush out the window of a painting studio—one of a vast matrix of little wooden cubicles in the belly of an old factory building in Brooklyn's Clinton Hill neighborhood. He spends most of his time here alone, sometimes painting, sometimes at the laptop composing his futuristic juke and footwork-derived digital soul. We had met up to "lab out" aka "track out" aka smoke loud, try and collaborate on a song, get too high to work collaboratively, and just shoot the shit until we ran out of beer or stories.

"I smelled this smell. Like, the most intoxicating, all consuming, sweetest perfume I've ever smelled," he said, zoning into a monitor glowing icy blue amidst paints, brushes, beer cans and glasses of muddy water. We were flanked on all sides by tall canvases that piled up against the makeshift plywood walls separating each subdivision—some stretched over frames, some drooping in corners, all dripping with creatures of different nebulous shapes and colors that stared back with big bug eyes through the dimness.

"I couldn't concentrate, couldn't focus on anything. The odor engulfed me. So I followed it, all the way down the hall." He looked me in the eyes, pointing to the ramshackle wooden door at the other end of the cubicle. "And just as I came to where this beautiful stench was most powerful, a door opened, right where I was standing." He shook his head as if he couldn't believe it himself, giggling a little. "This beautiful woman emerged from it, smiling, and I knew it was her." His eyes lit up. "I knew that she was the one who was giving off the smell."

"And?" I goaded, a tall tower of cigarette ash growing downwards towards my fingers.

I'll be real with you: there was no "and." Jabba trailed off and disappeared back into his laptop, and to my knowledge nothing happened between him and the smelly lady down the hall. I'm still not sure why he told the story or, more importantly, why it stuck with me. But this is exactly what happens when you spend all your time making creative work in solitary—you follow your own thoughts so far into the caverns that you forget nobody else came spelunking with you. This is the point where artists either achieve greatness or go batshit… or both. Whether or not anyone else catches on is ultimately what determines whether you are marked as a genius or a madman, a worthy artist or an outsider hack. If it all works out, you'll have an audience hanging on your every word, even if they're lost.

Jabba's first full-length release, Scales, is strongest when it produces the same effect as his story—a strange, elusive, sometimes frustrating, but seductive feeling. Just released on UK label Local Action, its nine tracks are poetry in a language and meter you've never heard.

While Jabba's Chicago footwork-inspired style is for the most part easily digestible—808 subs, kicks, snares and hats; Houston snare rolls, hi-hat triplets, arpeggios, "atmospheric" synth washes—his rhythms are painstakingly detailed, soulful and smooth. At their best (and weirdest), the synths slip away from familiar minor modes and dance teasingly out of bounds. Get two-thirds of the way into "Loki" or the last quarter of "Gorgon" and you'll hear what I'm talking about. The crisp clarity with which we hear these multi-layered digital pads play out totally bizarre melodic sequences evokes a feeling verging on awkwardness. Tracks will develop a steady gait only to break off entirely into unknown territory, as if they were two different songs stitched together. I find myself perking up at these moments when, with psychotic confidence, his tracks blast headfirst into the unknown and unreasonable. Is this the sound of Lil Jabba losing steam and shifting gears? Are these breakthroughs or happy accidents? Is he fucking with us?

This tendency to backslap the listener, in both rhythm and melody, is what has made the most slanted of Chicago footwork particularly exciting to those who get it, and vulnerable to criticism from purists who don't. The brazen subversion of listener's rhythmic and melodic expectations is what has caused English tastemakers like Kode9 and Planet Mu label owner Mike Paradinas to turn a thirsty ear to footwork producers like Rashad, Traxman, RP Boo, and DJ Nate. It is also what sometimes causes local DJs to clear floors when playing footwork tracks to unsuspecting crowds.

Like the pioneers of bebop in the early 20th century, these artists are consciously making music that defies preconceived notions of what good club music sounds like, or how to process it with your body—in the late '90s, when the off-kilter "footwork" sound was ruminating at the now-defunct Cavallini's warehouse space on Chicago's Southside, DJs like RP Boo would play tracks with rhythms so complex that only the dance crew he came with would know how to battle to them. You could call it experimental, but many Chicago footwork producers reject that label. "We're done experimenting," As DJ Spinn once said to me. "We've been doing this thing for decades. We know what we're making."

Many have credited RP Boo with initiating the rhythmic shift from the syncopated 4x4 bounce of juke to the unruly super-swung lurch that is "footwork." Like Jabba, Boo is a musical hermit. While he has always had friends and followers in the Chicago scene, Boo inhabits his own meticulously crafted sonic architecture—others have modeled their own structures after his, but he lives alone in his castle. It takes confidence and a certain single-minded lunacy to be so studied in a subject you have written the textbook for. On the other hand, RP doesn't live in a bubble. He has always written his music for dancers—footworkers who follow his every tap on the Roland R70 like the footsteps of a ghetto house messiah.

Jabba's position in relation to these greats is a privileged, but challenging one. As an outsider of the Chi—born in Australia, and raised between Paris and Manhattan—Lil Jabba has a wide cultural stable to pull influence from. However, as an official member of the Tek Life collective, there is pressure to make music that pays due homage to the Chicago footwork sound, while also setting itself apart stylistically.

Footwork culture has a two-fold rubric for greatness that holds for DJs and battle dancers alike. First: Do you know your basics, and can you do them well? Have you learned and practiced the foundations of the form to earn the right to move on to more complex combos? Second: Are you original, or are you just biting off someone else's style?

Fulfillment of the former is possible for anyone who is physically able. All you need is commitment. But to get to the latter, to build your own house, takes creativity, virtuosity, swag.

Lil Jabba has the first requirement down cold. No one can deny that. He knows the rhythmic formula and executes it with dexterity. Many producers do, but the very definition of boredom at this point is hearing another track on SoundCloud that uses all the plays in the book—oddly placed and swung trashcan toms, syncopated triplet kicks and vocal clips—all to a disappointing, totally un-banging end. It's what the guys in the Chi call a "carbon copy." Lil Jabba is not that.

In Chicago they say, "This is our house," but no one owns the designs for the ballast, the beam or the roof truss. Scales is the story of Jabba learning to build his own house. We hear the whir of UFOs, the grind and garble of great industrial machines, the croaks of toads and other more terrifying primordial beasts. While the album keeps us tethered to a concrete foundation of quantized rhythms, Jabba uses this sturdy bedrock as a launch pad for stranger melodic and sample-based departures.

If anything, I find myself asking for more. More dissonance, more noise, more murk, and more play. With time will come confidence and, along with that, more Jabba-ness.

Purchase Lil Jabba's Scales on iTunes here.