Best friends Chris Moten, Cassius Jay and Devon “Stixx” Taylor are classically trained jazz musicians, who put a spin on the genre and turned it into trap jazz. The documentary film Trap Jazz shows the three men at work and the masterminds who helped them fuse trap music with jazz.
Moten and co-manager Prince Howard spoke with rolling out about trap jazz, being considered for a Grammy, and the impact they hope the genre will have.
What is trap jazz?
Chris Moten: It’s an eclectic sound. The jazz sound is not a rehearsed sound, it’s more of an improvisational style. It’s like talking off the top of your head and it’s not structured, so I always call it structured chaos. The jazz is the culture from the Renaissance time, the jazz from the blues, or the jazz we started from gospel. It’s our sound, but a jazzy sound. We’re trying to keep the old-school jazz, but make it new and fresh. That’s why I like to bring the trap into it because that’s what we’re all on right now. If you’re 30 to 50 years old, you were listening to the trap in the 2000s. Even if you’re in your 60s right now, you were probably 40 years old at that time. It’s two eras, but it’s still all intertwined together. This is the trap sound from Atlanta, and everybody knows that Atlanta is the new hip-hop flag, so we’re trying to mix that with some jazz riffs and undertones.
What are your emotions around being considered for a Grammy?
CM: This is all new to me, and I didn’t think it would happen this way. Our time is not God’s time, and we’re never prepared to feel that way when it happens because we’re just grinding. They told us we were being considered for a Grammy and I’m like, “For what? We haven’t even put our main album out and we haven’t dropped what we really want to drop.” They told us that it was for the music film and I thought it was crazy. Most artists believe that they’re going to win or want to win an award for best song, song of the year, best album, best collaboration, or something along the lines of what your music did. But this is my life that’s so-called being considered for an award. This is our lives.
What do you want people to take away from trap jazz?
Prince Howard: From a management standpoint, and being a part of it from the outside looking in, what I want people to take out of it is friends and family, and being able to come together to create something from Atlanta, which influences a lot of pop culture. I want people to be able to see the inner workings of how things come down here in Atlanta, and how it goes on and affects the world.
