New York City Winter Jazzfest & Ace Hotel Brooklyn present… CREAM Rises: An Evening with Kassa Overall & Special Guests

Join New York City Winter Jazzfest and Ace Hotel Brooklyn in celebrating Kassa Overall’s new album CREAM with an exclusive album listening, followed by a conversation with acclaimed music journalists and authors Dan Charnas and Marcus J. Moore, and a special DJ by Vijay Iyer set to close out the night.

On CREAM, his fourth solo studio album, Kassa Overall pays homage to the twin passions of his youth — hip-hop and jazz drums in the tradition of Elvin Jones. With this collection of instrumentals, the visionary drummer and producer transforms beloved songs from the 90s and aughts into timeless standards that are rhythmically adventurous, witty, and often sublime. 

PANELISTS & PRESENTERS:

Kassa Overall is a Grammy-nominated jazz artist, drummer, emcee, singer and producer. He seamlessly blends jazz, hip-hop and avant-garde experimentation into a sound uniquely his own. His music is both innovative and accessible, pushing the boundaries of genre while remaining deeply engaging. Overall has released six critically acclaimed mixtapes and albums, including I Think I’m Good and Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz. His latest project, ANIMALS, explores the complexities of his identity as an artist and a Black man in America, featuring collaborations with an eclectic mix of musicians, from Danny Brown and Lil B to Nick Hakim and Vijay Iyer. A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Overall has been a driving force in the jazz world for over two decades. In 2020, he was called “one of modern jazz music’s most audacious futurists” by Pitchfork. He has toured and recorded with renowned artists like Geri Allen, Jon Batiste, Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Gary Bartz, and his production work can be heard on albums by Theo Croker, Arto Lindsay and Danny Brown. A Seattle native, Kassa Overall attended Washington MS and Garfield HS. A child drum prodigy, he taught himself to make beats on an MPC and an ASR 10 he acquired at a Seattle Police Department auction.

Marcus J. Moore is an author and music journalist whose work explores the intersection of Black culture, history, memory and sound. He is the author of High and Rising (A Book About De La Soul) and The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, and has written for outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork. With a voice rooted in curiosity and care, Moore’s writing centers artists as thinkers and communities as archives, tracing how music reflects and reshapes the world around it.

Dan Charnas is a bestselling author, award-winning music and business journalist, producer of records and television, and professor. Recipient of both a PEN Literary Award and a Pulitzer Fellowship for Arts Journalism, he is the author of four books; was the co-creator and executive producer of the VH1 TV series The Breaks; and is an Associate Arts Professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.

Charnas’s latest book is Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022). A New York Times Bestseller, Dilla Time is the winner of the 2023 Pen/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and was named a 2022 Notable Book by the Library of Michigan, and made 2022 “Best” lists for Pitchfork, Vulture, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Financial Times, Amsterdam News, Spin, HipHopDX, Esquire, and Variety. The product of four years of research and nearly 200 interviews, Dilla Time emerged from a course on J Dilla developed by Charnas at NYU in 2017, but its roots go back to Charnas’s time in the record business, when he first made the trip to Detroit to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee. Dilla Time has been called “one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker,” by Publishers Weekly; and “a new gold standard for writing about music” by Mojo Magazine.

RSVP is encouraged.

Listen to Kassa Overall’s “CREAM”