Hearing Los Angeles Differently: What Writing My Master’s Thesis Taught Me About Jazz, Hip Hop and Black America’s Next Musical Movement

Sometimes we don’t truly discover a city by walking its streets. Sometimes we discover it years later, while trying to understand the music it quietly gave the world.

I didn’t set out to write about Los Angeles. I set out to write about the relationship between jazz and Hip Hop. Instead, I found myself discovering a city in an entirely new way.

While writing my graduate thesis at The Graduate Center-City Univeristy of New York on the relationship between jazz and Hip Hop, I found myself returning to the same question over and over again: Why did so many of today’s most innovative artists working at the intersection of jazz and Hip Hop seem to have one thing in common? Again and again, my research pointed toward Los Angeles.

Long before graduate school, I spent years traveling to Los Angeles while serving as an editor — and eventually Editor-in-Chief — at The Source magazine. During those years, Southern California hip hop was largely defined by artists like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, The Game, Xzibit, and the Strong Arm Steady crew. Looking back now, I realize I completely missed what was quietly taking shape beneath the surface.

While much of the music industry focused on commercial rap success, another creative movement was slowly emerging. Artists such as Shafiq Husayn and the groundbreaking Sa-Ra Creative Partners collective — along with visionary musicians like Georgia Anne Muldrow — were already experimenting with fearless combinations of jazz, soul, Hip Hop, funk and electronic music that resisted easy categorization. Around them emerged an extraordinary community that included Flying Lotus, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Robert Glasper, Anderson .Paak, The Free Nationals, Steve Lacy and The Internet.

Writing my thesis helped me hear Los Angeles differently.

Of course, none of this emerged from nowhere. Long before Kendrick Lamar, Kamasi Washington or the Sa-Ra collective, Black Los Angeles had already established one of the nation’s great centers of Black cultural life. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Central Avenue served as the social, economic and cultural heart of Black Los Angeles. Much like Harlem in New York City, Central Avenue was a place where Black-owned businesses, churches, newspapers, musicians and civic organizations helped cultivate an ecosystem of creativity and self-determination. Jazz legends filled its clubs, entrepreneurs built businesses along its corridors, and generations of musicians inherited a tradition of artistic excellence that would echo across the decades. Artists such as Roy Ayers emerged from this broader cultural ecosystem. Seen in that light, today’s creative flowering feels less like a sudden emergence than the continuation of a much older story.

My research ultimately led me to conclude that jazz and Hip Hop are not competing musical forms. They are chapters within the same ongoing Black American conversation — one rooted in improvisation, storytelling, community, innovation and cultural memory.

Los Angeles appears to be where that conversation has found one of its most exciting new voices.

Ironically, this creative flowering appears to be unfolding during a period in which Los Angeles’ Black population has been declining for decades. As historically Black neighborhoods continue to experience displacement and demographic change, the city’s influence on Black American music remains remarkably resilient. It is both encouraging and sobering. Great musical movements are not created by algorithms or streaming platforms. They are created by communities. That is why the future of Black Los Angeles matters just as much as the extraordinary music it continues to produce.

Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly illustrates this beautifully. By bringing together Kamasi Washington, Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper and Thundercat, the album demonstrated that jazz remained a living language through which contemporary Black artists could speak to one another while introducing younger audiences to jazz through Hip Hop.

What fascinates me most about Los Angeles is that these artists are not trying to recreate jazz. They are embodying its philosophy: improvisation, experimentation, collective musicianship, fearless collaboration and a willingness to ignore conventional genre labels.

History suggests that Black American musical innovation has never remained fixed in one place: New Orleans, Chicago, Harlem, Detroit, the Bronx and Atlanta all contributed indispensable chapters. Perhaps Los Angeles is now contributing the next one. The story isn’t that Los Angeles has replaced New York. The story is that Los Angeles may be the first city since the birth of Hip Hop where jazz and Hip Hop have reunited as one creative language.

Maybe part of the reason I wanted to write this essay is because I miss Los Angeles. I miss Leimert Park. I miss grabbing food at Earle’s on Crenshaw after spending the day talking music, Black politics and culture while driving across the city with my former Source colleague, Ryan Ford. Back then, I thought I understood Los Angeles. Looking back now, I realize I was mostly paying attention to the surface.

I haven’t returned to the city since 2007, and I know a great deal has changed. Yet every time I see creatives and neighbors gathering at Harun Coffee in Leimert Park — a space where Chace Infinite has helped cultivate another creative meeting place — or hear about another performance at Blue Note Los Angeles, I am reminded that Black Los Angeles continues doing what it has done for generations: creating places where artists exchange ideas, challenge one another and imagine something new.

In the end, I think that’s why I wanted to write this essay.

Part of me misses Los Angeles.

But another part of me hopes future generations will still have the chance to discover the same creative city that I unknowingly witnessed all those years ago — a city where Black musicians continue reminding us that jazz and Hip Hop were never strangers, only family waiting to be reunited.

Perhaps that’s the greatest gift scholarship has given me. Not simply new information, but a new way of hearing a city I thought I already knew.

Fahiym A. Wasi is an adjunct lecturer in Africana Studies at Stony Brook University, a former Editor-in-Chief of The Source magazine, and an incurable student of Black American history, music and culture. His writing explores the intersections of history, economics, politics and Black cultural life. He still calls New York City home, though writing essays like this one makes him wonder whether Los Angeles has been calling him back all along.

Continue the Conversation Many of the ideas explored in this essay are developed in greater depth in my master’s thesis, Stolen Moments: Jazz and the Opportunity to Capture Hip Hop Fans, completed at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

You can read the full thesis on CUNY Academic Works.