Godtet: II | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- When the worlds of hip hop and jazz intersect the meeting can be fruitful, but also a little dangerous. The styles have a lot in common and even more to offer each other thanks to their differences. On the flipside the canned bangers of urban music can reduce jazz to looped, repetitive sterility, completely failing to do justice to the complexity, improvisatory skill and organic power of the style. So too, jazzers sometimes bring too much of the academy with them, lacking both the street smarts to get hip hop and, conversely, being too-smart-by-half, they noodle away at the sound until they’ve squeezed the life out of it. It takes an uncommon skillset and just an uncommon level of skill to work both sides of the street.

Dave Rodruigez is clearly a man confident of his own talent, or so adopting the moniker Godriguez would seem to suggest. He made a pretty good case for himself producing a couple of Sampa The Great’s records, but it’s arguable that Godtet is a bigger gambit still. Dave, along with Tully Ryan on drums, Jan Bangma on bass, Andrew Bruce on piano and Dominic Kirk on percussion comprise the band’s core members. Their first, thirty minute, self-titled affair was recorded off the back of an improv series. It has that feel, erring on the jazz side of their sensibility, if it can be said to err. The rhythms are fast-paced and complex, occasionally nudging across into frenetic and bizarre patterns that sound like IDM (see a tune like Hekkaz for example), although they’re more probably influenced by the band’s predilection for African sounds. Of course they’re under no obligation to stick to any particular style and happily bounce through latin beats, ambient interludes and jazz of a wide variety, from Necks sounding free-jazz hypnosis (on Take Off) to piano bar smoothness (on Maxlushcarlotta). Despite the stylistic diversity already on offer, Godtet have taken still another approach on their second release, the aptly titled II.

Dreamed up while touring the first record, the band were clearly already moving on in their heads. II has more of a hip hop and funk feel, like the pressure was dialed back and the players didn’t feel they had to prove they could improvise and solo like Bruce Lee could punch. There’s a connected smoothness that is less like everyone’s showing off their chops and more like they’re all moving in the same direction. When I say the pressure was dialled back, I don’t mean the intensity. Quite often here Godtet are jetting steam from every crack as they bond together pacy funk with a lush, shimmering and reverberant background and slightly more complex than average four-to-the-flour beats. At the same time funky, proggy and with some more of those African echoes, this sounds a bit like the sort of thing cosmic travellers like Mildlife or Tangents do, but with a bit more of the urban insanity of Flylo or Thundercat; cuts like Zawinul or Magnibro will give you ample evidence.

The sound is so lush, the samples so very seamless, the bass and the beats just that little bit more reminiscent of Dilla, I wondered if Godtet was using a different producer. Nope, still Jack Prest - obviously having a good day. It was laid down in just one day too. Since a good improv band can be mercurial, go in all sorts of different directions, I wondered some more if this record represents as much of a different direction as it seems, or perhaps it was just how they felt on that one day. Whichever it might be, Godtet can, apparently, hang about in hip hop or noodle it up in jazz, play both sides of the street and get away with it, like they owned the whole thing.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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