Domi and JD Beck might be the first musicians to ever shitpost their way into the jazz pantheon. At 22 and 19, respectively, they’re both undeniable prodigies – the former a keyboardist who plays with the same speed, intensity and militant precision that most people her age use to text, the latter a drummer who could probably keep perfect time with the ECG of a cardiac arrest.
They also have more in common with your average meme account admins than most artists signed to longstanding jazz label Blue Note: they refer to their rendition of John Coltrane’s My Favourite Things as My Favourite Ballsack; their spin on Coltrane’s Giant Steps is, of course, Giant Nuts; they once joked that their debut album would be called Pussy With Balls. To be a fan of Domi and JD Beck is to be constantly reminded of testicles – a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl was memorialised on Domi’s Instagram as a set at “the Hollywood Ballsack”.
It’s a little puerile, sure. But it is Domi and JD Beck’s blithe disregard for convention, aesthetically and musically, that has made their debut album, Not Tight (released via Blue Note and Anderson .Paak’s label new Universal imprint Apeshit) one of the year’s most anticipated debuts. It’s what got them noticed in the first place.
“When we were coming up as teenagers, [we were] around a lot of music that’s very slow,” says Beck, calling from Dallas. “You’ll go to a jam session and they’re playing, like, really slow R&B.” Adds Domi: “And on the radio, everything is the same tempo.” Naturally, Beck says, when he and Domi first started playing, they felt the need to harness the energy that they were missing. “We wake up, and we gotta play fast,” says Domi.
Domi was born Domitille Degalle in Metz, north-east France. Jazz was big in her household: “Charlie Parker, Keith Jarrett, the standard swing jazz.” At five, she was enrolled at the Conservatoire Régional du Grand Nancy; later she was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris and Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music, though the latter hesitated to admit her because she hadn’t yet received her high school diploma. She began playing classical music, but it was the freedom and improvisational nature of jazz that she was most attracted to.
Beck also began playing as a child, in Dallas, learning classical piano from the age of five and then drums. “I gravitated towards jazz because of the fast drums,” he says. “I grew up playing Led Zeppelin and the Police – it put me in that zone.” YouTube also proved helpful: he would watch “like, 10m videos” of iconic drummers such as Art Blakey, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams to study their techniques.
Both musicians became known as exceptional performers: Beck began playing with Erykah Badu’s band after the producer Jamal Cantero saw him at a jam session in Dallas, while footage of Domi blazing through Kendrick Lamar’s For Free went viral. In 2018, a mutual friend enlisted the pair to perform in a product demonstration at an annual trade show designed to showcase music gear. They relay the story with the same frantic rhythm of their music: terrible gig, terrible instruments, terrible in-ear monitors. “It was like, the worst thing ever,” says Beck.
Nonetheless, soon after, Degalle flew to Dallas to hang out with Beck. Videos of their jams caught the attention of jazz-adjacent luminary Thundercat, who enlisted them to play in his band, including during a 2020 Adult Swim performance featuring Ariana Grande and Anderson .Paak, who is now a mentor and close collaborator. “He just really understands us as people, and you don’t get that often,” says Beck.
Paak performs on two songs on Not Tight and co-wrote Moon, a collaboration he brokered with jazz legend Herbie Hancock. Meanwhile, Domi and Beck co-wrote Skate, a single from Paak’s Grammy-sweeping collaboration with Bruno Mars, An Evening With Silk Sonic.
Not Tight glides so effortlessly – sometimes capturing the verdant airiness of anime scores or the plush haze of alternative Los Angeles hip-hop – that you might miss the irregularity of Beck’s drumming or the borderline-manic energy of Domi’s keys. The pair credit trips to LA with shifting their perspective on how their music should sound.
“Being around pop stars opened us to where we were like, ‘Not everything is for, like, psycho jazz musicians who stay up until 8am,’” says Beck. “We would [be] playing in front of people who had no idea about anything musical at all. It made us think, ‘Should we be making music for the musician? Or should we just be making the best possible music we can make?’”
Not Tight, then, is not a perfect facsimile of those chaotic, jaw-dropping viral jam videos. Nor is it really a pop record – of all the famous people they’ve worked with, the one Domi and Beck gush about most is Hancock. “That was insane, to just see Herbie Hancock solo in front of you,” Domi says.
Instead, it’s a mostly jazz album that is ambitious and accessible, fearless and endearingly freaky. “We just try to write the best song we possibly can,” says Beck. “If it’s going to be impossible to play live, well, shit – we’ll try!”
The caption for the main image on this article was amended on 31 July 2022 to indicate that Domi is shown on the left.