There’s a smallish club called Rockwood Music Hall on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, around the corner from the legendary Katz’s Delicatessen. It’s the sort of place a young, striving musician might book for their first gig in the city, fresh out of Berklee College of Music and ready to take over the world. It’s also the imagined setting of a funny video by Spilly Cave, a 25-year-old songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and music school dropout who has nearly 40,000 followers on TikTok.
“This is [like] if that guy on Reddit was a jazz comp major and brought his girlfriend to his empty show at Rockwood Music Hall,” Cave deadpans, then launches into a guitar-centric rendition of Hudson Mohawke’s trap-EDM instrumental “Cbat,” which Cave has reharmonized, like a good jazz comp major, with a handful of slick extended chords. Viewers who spend too much time online will know “Cbat” for its role in a viral Reddit post about a hapless boyfriend’s poor choices in baby-making music. Those with an interest in jazz may nod approvingly at what Cave has done with the harmonies. And those who have been through the music-school wringer themselves will recognize Rockwood as the ideal locale for the tragicomic scene he has set.
With its hyperspecific fluency in the inside jokes of internet threads and conservatory rehearsal rooms; its display of actual, no-bullshit jazz chops; and the way it turns musical ability itself into a sort of meme, the clip from Spilly Cave is emblematic of an emerging style, which the critic Nate Chinen dubbed “viral jazz” in a piece for NPR, based on an earlier coinage by the great pianist Vijay Iyer.
This movement has been bubbling on YouTube and TikTok for years, but is now more prevalent than ever. Its exponents are musicians, many but not all of them quite young, who have jazz educations and aren’t afraid to show them off, but sense something faintly ridiculous in their own virtuosity. They love pop and bebop equally; they roll their eyes at the mere mention of the lick; they regard Thundercat as an elder statesman and the meme-fluent jazz YouTuber Adam Neely as a wisecracking uncle. They have managed to once again make jazz, or something like it, seem cool to their fellow kids.
The popularity of these new weird virtuosos is good news for anyone worried about jazz’s relevance in the 2020s. But it also raises questions about what it means when an art form so rooted in history and lineage reaches the context-obliterating shores of social media. A traditionalist might reasonably question whether a jokey 30-second TikTok video counts as jazz at all.
The stars of this community are DOMi and JD Beck, a keyboardist and drummer, aged 22 and 19, who are nominated for Best New Artist at next week’s Grammys, and can play circles around just about anybody. Or, if you believe the about section of their website, which loads after a spinning GIF of a mouse playing the world’s tiniest tenor sax: “domi is a 12 year old saxaphone [sic] prodigy from France” who “deveoloped [sic] her own unique sound by combining major 3rds and major 4ths”; and “jd beck is a 6 year old sheep investigator from Texas” who “devoted his life to smooth jazz and wishes to be taken seriously in the music industry.” Both, apparently, are also highly decorated theoretical physicists. All of this, down to the bunk music theory that supposedly explains DOMi’s unique sound, seems designed to deflect and parody the sort of baffled reaction that the duo tends to elicit from older and squarer listeners and journalists like me: Just how, exactly, are those kids doing that?
Take their performance of “NOT TiGHT,” the title track of their debut album, from an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. DOMi summons the power of nearly an entire band on her own: athletic solos, dense harmonic flurries, and funky basslines, played with either the left hand or the feet. Beck sounds like the electronic drum programming from an Aphex Twin or Squarepusher track come to life, strafing his partner with superhumanly fast and precise snare fills, deconstructing his own groove before bringing it back together again. This is not unprecedented territory for jazz; it is somewhat reminiscent of the pianist-drummer duo Brad Mehldau and Mark Guiliana, if you replaced their sojourns into starry progressive rock with softly swaggering neo-soul. But it is a thrill to see it executed so well, especially by players this young.
What is genuinely new is the notion that music like this might appeal to a broad and youthful audience, beyond the jazz diehards—that players like Beck and DOMi might share the stage with a pop star like Ariana Grande, or that their music might sit comfortably on a popular Spotify playlist alongside stylish alt-pop auteurs like Steve Lacy and Sudan Archives. The list of features on NOT TiGHT is a testament to the line DOMi and Beck have straddled thus far. On the one hand: Herbie Hancock and Kurt Rosenwinkel. On the other: Mac DeMarco and Anderson .Paak. “It’s not something we planned on doing, but we’re glad younger people are enjoying our music,” Beck says over email. “It’s really cool to be chased by a 70-year-old couple in the middle of Italy, and equally as cool to have an 8-year-old kid come with his parents to our Blue Note show in New York.”
Remarkably, DOMi and Beck have achieved their cool-kid appeal not by downplaying the nerdiest aspects of their musical personalities, but by foregrounding them. NOT TiGHT contains a handful of concessions to how pop music is supposed to sound, but on YouTube, where the pair first found their audience, their output consists chiefly of elaborate instrumental excursions. What is it about them that connects with listeners from outside the insular jazz realm? “We don’t really know how or why,” DOMi says. “We just write what we enjoy listening to and playing.”
One contributing factor may be the way they pair their knowledge of jazz theory and technique with a pronounced absurdist streak. Their respect for John Coltrane is apparent in their electrified readings of “My Favorite Things,” the most reliable standard in his repertoire, and “Giant Steps,” his signature original composition. But they aren’t too reverent to play the former at the breakneck tempo of a drum’n’bass track, or to rename the latter “Giant Nuts.” Before releasing NOT TiGHT, they referred to its eponymous track by the working title “Pussy With Balls.”
For Spilly Cave, the 25-year-old creator of the “Cbat” reharmonization TikTok, there is something inherently funny about extreme musical aptitude, which perhaps went unacknowledged in earlier generations’ adulation of drum gods and guitar heroes. “When it comes to this virtuosic playing, there’s this sense of absurdity at the state of life as a human in 2022,” he says. “For the longest time, if someone was brilliant at what they did, there was this reverence that was unnecessary. And now there’s this realization: It’s kind of a silly thing, to want to hit strings, or smack something, and for that to be the thing that you’re best at, for your whole life, you know? And that’s what makes it so beautiful.”
Not all of Cave’s output is so meme-y. He also writes and records original songs in a variety of styles, playing all the instruments himself. Though the music isn’t always designed to make you laugh, the visuals and the framing generally have some element of surreal comedy. He introduced one recent riff with a monologue about former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, Russian egrets, McDonald’s, and the metaverse. In videos, he pretty much never takes off his tiny pink sunglasses. Whether he’s making twitchy funk-pop, soaring guitar rock, or woozy instrumental hip-hop, his harmonic vocabulary and inclination toward shredding betray him as a jazz school kid.
Depending on your perspective, you might see Cave’s genre-hopping a few different ways: as the sign of a talent that’s still searching for its most authentic expression, a canny response to ever-changing trends and algorithmic preferences, or a simple reflection of the fact that scenes and the barriers between them don’t matter as much as they used to. Once, he put together a riff—groovy but melancholy, like a cross between lo-fi hip-hop, Midwest emo, and Pat Metheny—while waiting for his brother to come over to play Super Smash Brothers. When he posted it to TikTok, it took off immediately. Inspired by that positive feedback, he turned it into a full song called “minutia,” which now has more than 800,000 plays on Spotify. Anthony Fantano recently bestowed upon Cave what is perhaps the highest compliment a TikToker can receive: “He keeps popping up on my For You page and his vibes are immaculate.”
Cave doesn’t see an intrinsic difference between proper songs like “minutia” and outwardly jokey stuff like his Hudson Mohawke jazz cover. “The essential part is always making sure the composition is good,” he says. “Whatever idea I have, whether it be more serious or more lighthearted, it kinda doesn’t matter to me—it’s all part of a singular identity. I like writing all types of music. And I have lots of stupid thoughts.”
A glance at Dwayne Thomas Jr.’s YouTube channel might lead you to the misguided conclusion that the bass guitarist better known as MonoNeon is more concerned with memes than he is with music. There are songs, as most people would recognize them, here and there. But the bulk of his output consists of something different: split-screen videos, with MonoNeon on one side—usually clad in a patchwork of iridescent fabrics, sometimes including a crocheted mask—and some bit of seemingly random internet detritus on the other. The person on the opposite side of the video begins talking, and MonoNeon plays along, precisely matching the irregular fluctuations of rhythm and pitch in their speech with his bass. Then, a beat kicks in, and suddenly this TikTok video of a toddler talking on the phone or snippet of a podcast interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson isn’t just musical—it’s funky as hell.
MonoNeon doesn’t just make YouTube videos: he’s self-released dozens of solo records, his session credits include tracks by Nas and Mac Miller, and he used to jam regularly with Prince as part of the Paisley Park house band. But he seems particularly at home with the format. Spend enough time with these clips, and you’ll realize that he isn’t simply trying to skim some views off the top of whatever is currently trending; he’s made a real art out of transforming the internet’s vast troves of recorded speech into song. He seems to choose source material based on its latent musical properties rather than its potential virality: like the exaggerated pauses between repetitions of “oh my god” a podcast host makes after realizing her wig has fallen off, or his otherwise puzzling decision to work with a Will Ferrell clip that positively lit the internet on fire when it was released… in 2007.
“The phrasings, the melodicism in human speech (animals too) have definitely influenced my melodic development in thangs I play and write,” he says in an email exchange that is peppered with idiosyncratic spellings. “Experimenting with speech-to-music over the years has also opened my ears to so much stuff in everyday life.” He cites 20th-century avant-gardists Marcel Duchamp and John Cage as influences on his philosophy that the objects and textures of daily existence can be transfigured into art, and that serious creative work can also be very funny.
Though MonoNeon collaborates often with DOMi and JD Beck—they have performed as a trio under the name Whateva the Fyucks—it is difficult to imagine him ever crossing the Grammys stage, except in some freaky alternate timeline. If DOMi and Beck make few concessions to pop accessibility, he makes none. Among his cohort, he seems the least preoccupied with using social media as a means for advancing his career, or with the trappings of a career whatsoever.
“Shiet I don’t be making much money from my online content,” he writes when I ask him about the economics of his work. “My videos I post, my original music I release—that’s just me wanting to get heard. Like this is me muthafyucka—that’s it, if the money comes with me being me that’s cool. I just gotta keep creating!!!”
But along with his humor, his eye-catching visuals, his mind-bending technical ability, and his use of jazz chops to make music that doesn’t always sound like jazz, he has another important thing in common with the other new weird virtuosos. “If it wasn’t for the internet and social media,” he writes, “you probably would not know a damn thang about me.”
If you were to trace this all back to a single progenitor, there’s a good chance you’d land on Louis Cole, or at least pass him along the way. DOMi called him a friend “who we deeply respect musically.” MonoNeon has played with him. Cave had something like an epiphany when he heard Cole’s 2010 self-titled album for the first time. “It rocked my world,” Cave says. “It was so jazz-but-not-jazz. It was everything I wanted to do.”
Cole, 39, is primarily a drummer, but he can rip on seemingly any instrument he picks up. His best-known songs are maddeningly catchy, relentlessly irreverent, and nearly impossible for ordinary humans to play, full of breakneck chord changes and stoned late-night humor. He’s also enamored of wistful old pop and jazz standards; his fourth album Quality Over Opinion includes sweeping orchestral arrangements and big, unguarded feelings amid the chaos and jokes.
Cole started building his audience in earnest about a decade ago on YouTube, and still considers the video platform his “strongest avenue” for connecting with listeners. He’d been trying to make it as a musician in the old-fashioned way, hitting the road as the drummer in friends’ bands, hoping their small crowd might get a little bit bigger by word of mouth each time they came back to a given city. One of those friends was Jack Conte, who, as one half of the duo Pomplamoose, would soon become one of the first musicians to turn YouTube virality into a successful career. “He was just like, ‘Louis, man, this tour thing, it’s just not working. There’s gotta be something else,’” Cole remembers. Soon enough, Conte was posting homemade music videos to YouTube and encouraging Cole to do the same.
Where Pomplamoose’s videos had a certain cuddly earnestness, Cole’s were off-the-wall in the manner of an Adult Swim show: nauseatingly abrupt digital zooms, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them visual gags. His most popular video to date is a 2017 clip of his band KNOWER playing their tune “Overtime” in a nondescript hallway, with onscreen text narrating the song’s various changes, as if the viewer requires a visual prompt to understand that a drum fill or sax solo is happening.
His most distinctive contribution to the new weird virtuosity may be Clown Core, an ostensibly anonymous duo that is widely understood to consist of Cole and the saxophonist Sam Gendel. They play a furiously technical and laugh-out-loud blend of jazz, electronic music, and extreme metal, in clown masks, sometimes from the inside of a moving minivan, and others from the inside of a port-a-potty. (“My official statement, on the record,” Cole says when I ask him about Clown Core, “is that I’ve never heard of Clown Core.”) The comedy isn’t only in the presentation, but the playing itself: In the song “1,” Gendel emits a single timid bleat before Cole’s frantic drumming utterly engulfs his sax, like the whelp of a cartoon character confronted with a terrifying monster.
Cole followed a distinctly new trajectory as a musician, one that would be unrecognizable to the 1960s and ’70s jazz players he looks to as inspirations. Still, a half decade has passed since he first started racking up YouTube views in the millions. He is of two minds about the idea that the aesthetic he helped to pioneer is reaching a new peak in its cultural impact. He can tell that certain younger musicians see him as an important influence. And plenty of people are coming to his concerts these days.
But he’s noticed a dip in viewer engagement with his YouTube videos, and he doesn’t feel like he’s really cracked the newer platforms. He’s gotten genuine artistic fulfillment out of posting to Instagram, challenging himself to compose micro-scale pieces of music that meet the platform’s one-minute cap on video length. Not so much on TikTok. “I’ll do little drum videos, or something that I know for sure is going to do well on these internet platforms for shredded attention spans, and I try to keep it still fulfilling for me,” he says. “I just use it as another outlet, because it’s another place where eyeballs are.”
There is a subtle generational divide between Cole and the musicians who have arrived in his wake, like Spilly Cave, who sees TikTok as a worthy outlet for creative expression in and of itself. Cole puts a lot of care into his YouTube videos, and looks at some of them as artworks on par with the music that soundtracks them. Others are more like promotional tools, for getting people to come to a show, or buy an album, or just listen to a song. He seems mildly deflated by social media’s centrality in the current-day music business. “I guess I have experienced a different time, when it was the older model of doing it, which is releasing an album and then trying to tour,” he says. “Now, it seems like every musician is labeled a ‘content creator.’”
“These players who are in their thirties now inspired my generation of players to be like, ‘Oh shit, through the internet, all things really are possible, to a certain extent,’” Cave says of Cole and his cohort. “There was this optimism. Everyone who was learning jazz theory was like, ‘OK, wait, everything can be jazz. This is acceptable now. This is cool.’”
Though Cave and his peers are following a path first set out by Cole’s generation, their intended destinations may be slightly different. Cave uses the crowdfunding platform Patreon, which Cole’s old bandmate Jack Conte dreamed up and turned into a billion-dollar business after the success of Pomplamoose convinced him that independent artists could use the internet to make a living. “My goal,” Cave’s Patreon bio reads, “is to be a content creator full-time.”
There are long-running discussions in the jazz community about the role of jazz education, which began on the bandstand, with older players instructing younger ones as they worked, and migrated eventually to the conservatory, with formalized lesson plans and high tuition fees. This change in pedagogy brought with it a sweeping reversal in the racial demographics of a historically Black art form. A National Endowment for the Arts report published in 2002 found that white people made up the overwhelming majority of working jazz players in various major U.S. cities: as high as 73 percent of non-union musicians in New Orleans, a historic crucible of Black culture and jazz tradition—even higher than the percentage of white people in the city’s population overall.
These days, you could make yourself into a proficient player without ever meeting another musician face-to-face, slowly learning by watching YouTube and practicing on your own. The new weird virtuosity may be a reaction to this shift: a player’s study of melodic minor modes can now happen just a browser tab away from her TikTok feed, where there’s no professor to tell her she’s not allowed to dabble in pop music or don a clown mask. Jazz, along with everything else, now happens online as well as in the physical world; it makes sense that its aesthetics would shift to reflect that.
“The access to music education has just ballooned,” says Spilly Cave, who believes that the current focus on extreme technical ability may be directly traceable to this ostensible democratization. Perhaps there are simply more people on Earth now who can play like DOMi and JD Beck than there used to be, and more people who are educated enough to appreciate what they’re doing, even if they can’t replicate it.
But the internet also has its biases and barriers. The most visible faces in this new generation of web-savvy jazz players are often as white as those in the academy. That doesn’t undermine the sense of joy and curiosity in this music, but it does speak volumes about who has access to the kind of training that would make them a virtuoso in the first place—and who gets praised for experimenting and reimagining the possibilities of jazz in the process.
Humor has long been entwined with virtuosity, especially but not only in jazz. Thelonious Monk could elicit laughter with a particular note choice or rhythmic inflection; Louis Armstrong loved to ham it up onstage and on record; Chico and Harpo Marx were extraordinarily gifted musicians who had no qualms with using their abilities as a gag.
Louis Cole sees comedy as a vital part of his expression as a musician, but also has more complicated ideas about its role in the online attention economy. “With the way that music is released now, which is so married to video, [comedy] just does well. People want to see humorous content on these platforms. If I add that to the music, it’s not going to hurt.” The virtuosity itself may also be connected to YouTube and TikTok viewers’ attention spans and appetites for certain kinds of videos. You want to see somebody do something crazy, whether it’s jump off a cliff, or pop a giant pimple, or play “My Favorite Things” at 200 beats per minute. Maybe it’s that simple: On the internet, in music as in politics, the most extreme content has a way of rising to the top.
For an art form so concerned with tradition, jazz has proven itself remarkably malleable over the decades, including when it comes to assimilating and influencing whatever sounds are currently popular. It happened in the ’70s, when fusion bands like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report played to arenas full of hard rockers, and again in the ’90s, when Native Tongues hip-hop groups like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest introduced a new generation to the likes of Ahmad Jamal and Milt Jackson through sampling. More than just a genre, jazz is also a language, with a vocabulary—of chords, rhythms, melodic ideas, compositional strategies—that musicians can arrange in the syntax of rock’n’roll, or funk, or R&B, or any other style. Should Clown Core count as jazz music? Maybe, maybe not. Would Cole and Gendel have been able to make it without first learning jazz as a language? No way in hell.
The internet may privilege certain sorts of art—in this case, jazz that is brash, immediate, hyper-technical, tongue-in-cheek, pop-adjacent, if it can be called jazz at all—but it also makes nearly everything else available for those who are willing to dig deep enough. It’s not hard to imagine a teenager starting with DOMi and JD Beck and eventually making their way to Cecil Taylor and Sunny Murray. Take a comment left on a video of Louis Cole performing live in 2019: “I feel like I have been tricked into enjoying jazz. I started on a Clown Core video three hours ago and now here I am.”
