There are types of jazz meant for elevators, and then there’s the good stuff you can pair with your favorite strain of spliff-packing material. But just as you wouldn’t want to match certain foods with incompatible alcoholic drinks, you also wouldn’t want to contaminate your musical palate with corny sounds.
This is especially true when you happen to be high, and your mind is open to different thoughts and ideas; you don’t want things to get weird, in the bad way.
Jazz lends itself well to cannabis and its culture and was of course used for inspiration in many a great recording or jam session, or even to calm nerves prior to a performance. And fortunately for all of us who’ve ever enjoyed the marriage of music and marijuana, a new wave of really great jazz musicians has established itself.
Some of the players who’ve emerged from this scene are recent arrivals, while others have slowly been building reputations and fan bases based simply on their devotion to making good music and letting us hear it.
In service to them, and to connect smokers with the makers of some of this brilliant music, here are a few recommendations.
Bruce Baker/ Wikimedia Commons
Drunk, by Thundercat
Mood: Fun, mellow funk
An L.A.-based singer, songwriter, bass guitarist and producer, Thundercat’s name became much more familiar as an artist in his own right after his session work on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.
But if you look through liner notes of albums by some of today’s most respected musical talents—ranging from hip-hoppers like Childish Gambino and Mac Miller to soul singers like Bilal and Erykah Badu—you’ll find him credited.
He uses his unmistakable voice—a perfect-pitch falsetto—to push a proprietary sound