Animals (Album)

The drummer whose genre-crossing work has brought acclaim here and abroad returns with “Animals,” an LP of jazz, rap and soul inspired by the struggle to be OK.On a cloudy afternoon, the drummer Kassa Overall strolled past his first New York City apartment, a second-floor room in a Fort Greene brownstone. He had moved to Brooklyn after graduating from Oberlin in 2006 to play in the local jazz scene while improving his chops as a beatmaker. To help him make ends meet, the drummer Billy Hart got him a gig playing the djembe for a physical therapy dance class at a nursing home in Harlem.“So I came into the game with a consistent paying thing, low rent, and it was just like, ‘Damn, I’m here,’” Overall, 40, said as he toured his old neighborhood in March. “So I just stayed.”Fast-forward to 2020: Overall had built himself into a noted musician here and abroad, with a multifaceted sound synthesizing jazz, rap and R&B, and an album called “I Think I’m Good” — on the British tastemaker Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings label — poised to push him into wider circles. Or so he thought. “It really felt like this was about to pop,” Overall recalled. “We did Japan, then we did the West Coast, and we were selling out merch every show.”But the pandemic shut down the possibility of further touring. Overall flew back to his native Seattle and wondered what was next. “I went from being a touring musician and always having extra income to barely having enough,” he said over lunch, opening up about his hard times without any apprehension. “I felt like I wasn’t as successful as it felt like I was on the internet.”The anguish led him to start work on a new album, “Animals,” out May 26, about the struggles of surviving as an entertainer, and how the pressure to stand out can push an artist too far. “I’m one of those people that’s like, I had mental illness stuff back in the day, and I have a sensitivity,” he explained. “I can’t just walk through the world normal. I got to do a lot of [expletive] to keep my train on the track.”“I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it,” Overall said. “So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Michael Tyrone DelaneyOverall had challenges throughout college, while he was studying jazz performance; he couldn’t sleep and had bouts of what he called “super high energy.” Then he’d be depressed for days. “I remember even telling my mom one day, ‘I think I’m bipolar,’” he said, recalling a moment when he was in high school. “I had this period where I was getting real isolated.” He described a manic episode where he began seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. “I started seeing stuff on me.”“I Think I’m Good” unpacked the experience of living with bipolar disorder through scant electroacoustic backing tracks and heavily modulated vocals. “Animals” takes a different approach, inspired by Overall’s feeling of kinship with unconventional musicians like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix — “artists that you could tell were special, but also couldn’t really handle the pressure,” he said.The album’s vigorous jazz, rap and soul blends live instruments with electronic drum tracks. Its formidable roster of collaborators includes the rappers Danny Brown, Lil B and Ish of Shabazz Palaces; the vocalists Nick Hakim and Laura Mvula; and the jazz instrumentalists Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer. “The Lava Is Calm” features chilling piano; “Maybe We Can Stay” spotlights sweeping strings and flutes darting across a bouncy backbeat.“It feels like you’re in a zoo — you can’t go full animal, you know?” Overall said. “I was feeling like, within this machine and within this whole organism, I can see within myself, I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it. So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Overall’s childhood in Seattle was filled with music and life lessons from his free-spirited parents. (His mother worked for the local PBS station, and his father did odd jobs and stayed at home with the children.) “Everybody else had Kraft singles and Coca-Cola,” he quipped, “we had soy milk and tofu.”He was a quick study who learned how to play drums as a young child, exploring a living room full of instruments that his father collected. There was a piano, saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, a broken violin, a four-track recorder and a beat machine that he said no one knew how to use. But Overall learned how to manipulate the electronic equipment; by fourth grade, he and his older brother, Carlos, started playing jazz songs like “Autumn Leaves” and “A Night in Tunisia.”“I’m coming home with a lot of dollar bills and ironing them,” he remembered of their early performances. “And my dad was super hands-on with us. He would take us to the spot and set up, we’d find a corner and make bread.”Overall grew up listening to a wide array of artists — John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, Public Enemy and DJ Quik — which gave him a natural feel for all kinds of sounds. A turning point in his relationship to music came when he was a sophomore in high school and landed a $9 an hour job sweeping peanut shells and taking out trash at the Major League Baseball stadium in Seattle. After he and some friends were fired for smoking marijuana, he had a realization.“Wait a minute. I’m doing jazz gigs, getting a hundred a night, 150, sometimes 200 on a good gig,” Overall remembered thinking. “So I could either level this up or I could get better at sweeping peanuts and stuff. And I haven’t had a real job since then.”Hart, a mentor and one of Overall’s Oberlin professors, was taken by his student’s assertiveness. “I knew he had a certain amount of self-confidence that was obvious when he got there,” said Hart, who is also a noted Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner collaborator. “As far as I’m concerned, Kassa is a jazz musician who has excelled in the pop field,” he added. “He’s found a unique direction all his own. If he keeps going the way he’s going, he’s going to be a major star.”Peterson, the Brownswood Recordings founder, was one of Overall’s early supporters, and he said he was struck by Overall’s curiosity for sounds outside jazz. “He’s kind of incorporated all these elements and made something fresh and new, but with all the aspects of traditional music,” he said. “He has a really great sense of being able to push the audience to a point where they can’t take anymore before bringing the beat back in — it’s brave.”Speaking and writing candidly about his own struggles requires its own bravery, but Overall says the new album isn’t simply about one person’s trials.“We’re all aspiring to reach a higher place. And we’re all aspiring to do better,” he said. “But also have empathy for those who don’t. Because I know how hard it is. I know how hard it is to just do OK. There’s a large percentage of us that are not going to do OK. So maybe those are the people we consider animals. But it could have been you, could have been me. May have been me in the past life, or in the next life.” More