Gaika: ‘Jazz and drill are just staring at each other - I want to join the dots'

“Truth”: Gaika’s show Palatium is part of EFG London Jazz Festival
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Jane Cornwell6 November 2020

“Being locked inside this giant Covid prison forces you to consider dimensions,” says Gaika, sitting on his couch in his dressing gown, tattoos of flowers and a serpent winding across his chest. “When you’re on your own, listening to music, you start thinking about the emotion in the sounds and the meaning in the lyrics. About where you are and what sort of society you’re living in.”

He pauses, his Zoom gaze steady. “How would you feel in a different place, under a different system?”

It’s with such questions in mind that the Brixton-born thirty-something has created Palatium, an audio-visual performance that is streaming as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival next week. An underground hero, celebrated for both his activism and his hybridity — his cross-genre music and media spans installation, visual art, technology, writing and performance — Gaika is best known for the spooky, dystopian rap style he calls ‘ghetto-futurism’. But jazz? Not really.

“I don’t know how many of my fans would go to a jazz gig,” he muses. “Or how many jazz fans would come to see me on tour. But in London you’ve got this big new wave of jazz that happened in a very DIY way, and you’ve got a drill and urban music scene that’s becoming really mainstream.

“Both sides have done the same thing but they’re just sort of standing and staring at each other. I want to join the dots, create a conversation.”

It’s early morning in pre-lockdown west London. In an hour or so this eldest son of Jamaican and Grenadian parents is off to visit friends in Manchester, where he briefly studied engineering before switching to art school, creating videos for Manc hip hop collective Murkage, in which he was also an MC, along the way.

Gaika’s background as a director feeds his music: “Everything I do is conceptual,” he says of a sound built from elements of dancehall, dub and reggae, garage, trap and grime. It surges with ideas — around black identity, capitalism, colonialism, authoritarianism, more — and authentic, unsettling emotion.

“If I create a piece of music that makes me want to cry then I know it’s good,” he says. “My work directly represents what I see as the truth. I have no time for rules that say a rap guy with tattoos and jewellery is bad or less articulate just because the white middle class finds him threatening.

“For me London is on a knife-edge because of the increasing gap between rich and poor. It’s a city full of galleries and museums with empty spaces and young people with great ideas; of immigrants driving taxis who were or could have been neurosurgeons but for racism.”

Gaika’s current EP Seguridad, the follow-up to his acclaimed 2018 debut album Basic Volume, addresses such notions while cutting-and-pasting sounds in ways potent, fluid and curiously optimistic. He recorded it in Mexico with leftfield dance music collective NAAFI, who he met on tour. London was on his mind, nonetheless: “Hard from we born, it’s the London way,” he declaims over scattergun beats, through an eerie vocoder haze.

Which all seems a far cry from the archive of vinyl that Gaika and fellow mavericks Miink and Azekel will plunder for Palatium, a show that folds jazz samples into contemporary electronics and sets the results against a backdrop of experimental film. Named for palaces built by Roman emperors, Palatium aims to smash and rebuild what programme notes describe as “the unseen architecture that houses the fatigued revolutionary body.”

Or if you like, to refresh the legacy of late black visionaries. Reboot the drive to storm the barricades.

“It’s definitely experimental but I’ll get my point across,” says Gaika, whose 2018 installation System at Somerset House considered Notting Hill Carnival and sound system culture in the context of immigration, blackness and the holding of space, and addressed London’s links to slavery with Flight Recorder, a “functional sculpture” commissioned by Soho’s House of St Barnabas as part of Black History Month.

He shows me some of the vinyl he’ll be using for Palatium: classics by jazz greats John Coltrane and Miles Davis — black visionaries both — and the Jamaican-Canadian ska innovator Jackie Mittoo. Each record is chosen from the collection that once belonged to Gaika’s late father Charlton Philip Tavares, a soundsystem DJ and pioneering materials scientist who died in 2016.

As a kid Gaika would listen to music by jazz pianist Thelonious Monk (“A complicated experience”) while tinkering on a toy keyboard, or later, dismantling and reassembling x-ray spectrometers and other hardware brought home from his dad’s laboratory Basic Volume, which was located on an industrial estate in West Norwood and entirely staffed by black scientists.

“My father was working with superconducting materials and made several breakthroughs. He had an exhibit in the Science Museum. But this was the Eighties; he was black, and a bit of a socialist. His business received no support and it all fell apart and he never recovered. So much potential wasted because of racism,” he adds.

Art and science were never mutually exclusive. “We focused on maths and science but were also drawing, painting, writing and making music,” he continues (he has two younger brothers; one is an MIT research scientist, the other is the filmmaker Kibwe Tavares). “My parents’ priority was our education.”

The Tavares brothers weren’t just encouraged to think outside the box. They were encouraged to take the box apart, examine its contents then rebuild it, better. Gaika’s upbringing, then, helps explain his sculptural, technically fire-powered aesthetic, his knack for building frameworks that house big emotions — from appraisals of violence to faith in romance and love.

“A lot of my work is about people’s relation to the space they’re in, whether it’s physical or mental,” he says. “And right now we’re at home in small numbers, or on our own. We want to listen to something that reflects the times, makes us think about the future.

“It’s healing music.” A smile. “But it’s also really intense.”

Gaika, Miink and Azekel present Palatium via live stream on Friday 20 November, 8pm, here. Buy tickets here.  The EFG London Jazz Festival streams from 13-22 November, efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk