The Long Way Around
BadBadNotGood started as a joke that refused to stay funny. Three students at Humber College in Toronto uploaded a cover of Odd Future's Bastard in 2011, playing it straight on keys, bass, and drums like they were interpreting a jazz standard. The internet noticed. Tyler the Creator noticed. Within months they were collaborating with the people they had been covering, transforming from music school kids into something the jazz world had not seen in decades: young players who actually connected with audiences under thirty.
The thing about BBNG is that their origin story tends to overshadow what came after. Yes, the YouTube covers were clever. Yes, Tyler bringing them into the Odd Future orbit gave them credibility in hip hop circles. But reducing them to that early moment misses the far more interesting arc. Over six albums and more than a decade, Matthew Tavares, Chester Hansen, and Alexander Sowinski built something that functions as a real time document of what happens when jazz stops being precious about its own boundaries.
Their 2014 album III marked the first major pivot. Tracks like Can't Leave the Night showed a band less interested in proving they could hang with rappers and more focused on building tension through repetition and space. The song barely changes over its runtime. A descending piano figure loops while drums shuffle underneath, building emotional weight through restraint rather than virtuosity. It sounded closer to Boards of Canada than Herbie Hancock, and that was precisely the point. Jazz had spent decades chasing complexity as proof of seriousness. BBNG asked what happened if you chased feeling instead.
Collaboration As Creative Practice
The Ghostface Killah project remains one of the strangest major label releases of the last decade. Sour Soul dropped in 2015, pairing one of Wu Tang's most idiosyncratic voices with a Toronto instrumental trio barely out of their twenties. On paper it should not have worked. Ghostface's style relies on density, on stacking images and references until verses feel overstuffed in the best way. BBNG's instinct runs toward space and patience. But tracks like Six Degrees and Ray Gun proved the pairing made sense precisely because of that tension. The band gave Ghost room to stretch, and he responded with some of his most emotionally direct writing in years.
That collaborative impulse became central to how BBNG operated. They contributed to Kendrick Lamar's untitled unmastered, providing the instrumental bed for Untitled 09. They worked with Tyler again on tracks for Cherry Bomb. They brought Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands into the fold for Time Moves Slow on IV, a decision that raised eyebrows among fans who wanted them to stay purely instrumental. But that track, with Herring's voice cracking against a slow build of keys and synths, became one of their most enduring pieces. It revealed a band unafraid of pop structures when those structures served the song.
IV in general represented their commercial peak. Released on XL Recordings in 2016, it positioned them alongside artists like Radiohead and Adele on one of the world's most respected indie labels. The album sold well. It toured well. But something shifted in the years after. Keyboardist Matthew Tavares left the group in 2018, and the remaining members brought in new collaborators including Leland Whitty on saxophone and guitar. The sound opened up. Talk Memory in 2021 embraced longer form improvisation, with tracks like Beside April stretching past seven minutes without ever feeling indulgent. They brought in Terrace Martin and Brandee Younger, players with deep roots in both jazz and contemporary R&B. The album felt like a statement of intent: they were not going back to YouTube covers or tidy four minute compositions.
Mid Spiral And The Return To Raw
Their 2024 album Mid Spiral takes that ethos further. Where Talk Memory still felt somewhat constructed, assembled in studios with deliberate guest features, Mid Spiral sounds like a band in a room trusting each other. Tracks like Open Palm capture the push and pull of live performance, the way musicians breathe together when they have been playing together for years. The production is dry, almost confrontational. You can hear fingers on strings, the creak of kick drum pedals, the occasional exhale between phrases.
This matters in a moment when so much instrumental music gets smoothed out for algorithmic consumption. The lo fi hip hop streams, the focus playlists, the ambient backgrounds for studying or sleeping. That entire economy depends on music that does not demand attention, that exists primarily as texture. Mid Spiral rejects that premise completely. It asks you to lean in, to follow a saxophone line as it circles back on itself, to sit with tension that does not resolve the way you expect.
The album also marks a kind of maturity that earlier BBNG releases only hinted at. These are players in their mid thirties now, long past the novelty of being young jazz musicians who listen to rap. They have survived lineup changes, label shifts, the pandemic years that gutted touring income for instrumental acts without streaming numbers. And yet Mid Spiral sounds energized rather than fatigued, like a band that finally stopped asking permission to make exactly the music they want to make.
What They Mean Now
The jazz revival of the past few years has been well documented. Kamasi Washington's The Epic in 2015 opened doors. Artists like Makaya McCraven and Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings built on that momentum, creating scenes in Los Angeles and London and Chicago that treat jazz as living practice rather than museum piece. BBNG were early to that movement, but they have also remained slightly apart from it. Their Toronto base keeps them at a distance from the LA jazz renaissance. Their hip hop roots make them outliers at traditional jazz festivals. They exist in the gaps, which may be why their influence shows up in unexpected places. You hear it in the instrumental breaks on Tyler's later albums. You hear it in the way producers like Kaytranada build drum patterns. You hear it whenever a young artist decides that jazz can be cool without being corny.
Mid Spiral probably will not chart the way IV did. It is too patient for that, too willing to let moments breathe. But that patience is its own argument. In a landscape of two minute songs engineered for playlist placement, a jazz trio releasing forty minutes of improvisation heavy instrumental music feels almost political. Not in any explicit sense, but in the way it insists that music can still be an experience rather than content.
BadBadNotGood started by translating hip hop into jazz vocabulary. A decade later they have become something harder to categorize: a band that sounds like itself and no one else, making music that rewards the kind of attention most platforms discourage. That is worth more than any viral moment.
