Jazz Rap
Jazz rap is hip hop that builds its beats from jazz samples or live jazz playing, such as upright bass, horns and piano.
It appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets, who laid relaxed, thoughtful rhymes over loops from old jazz records. The mood is usually mellow and the lyrics often positive or political. Later albums such as Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly used live jazz musicians instead of samples.
Artists it is known for: A Tribe Called Quest, Gang Starr, Digable Planets.
- Family
- Hip-Hop & Rap
- On Spotify
- A current genre
- What it is
- A genre
- From
- United States, late 1980s
- Also called
- jazz hip hop, jazz hop
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 7%
About 5,700 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have jazz rap among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
Jazz Rap artists
MF DOOM
Freddie Gibbs
Joey Bada$$
Westside Gunn
Madvillain
Nujabes
A Tribe Called Quest
The Alchemist
Common
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The jazz rap artists most Trackify listeners have in their top fifty. Each opens on Spotify.
Sources
The definition is written for this site from open sources, and was checked against them on 13 November 2026.