This morning the Jazz Is Dead label published an essay called "Yes, Culture Keepers" that asks a question every record shop should be able to answer: what does it actually mean to keep a culture alive? Writer Leo Moraes admits he initially bristled at the phrase — it sounded like gatekeeping, velvet ropes, purity tests. Then he worked his way round to a better definition, and it's one we recognise from behind the counter: culture keepers aren't curators guarding a museum. They're carriers. The friend who brings a record back from a trip abroad. The DJ who plays one more deep cut than the room asked for. People who pass things forward, slightly altered by their own hands.
The essay leans on a couple of ideas worth sitting with. One is Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz's concept of transculturation: when two cultures meet, you don't get one absorbing the other — you get a third thing that didn't exist before. Bossa nova is the textbook case. American jazz harmony met samba rhythm in Rio apartments in the late fifties, and the result was so new it got re-exported straight back to the source, covered by Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald within a decade.
The other is Oswald de Andrade's 1928 Manifesto Antropófago — the Cannibalist Manifesto — which told Brazilian artists to stop apologising for outside influences and instead devour them, digest them, and make something unmistakably their own. "Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question." Swallow Shakespeare, produce Tropicália.
Sound familiar? It should — it's the entire history of dance music
If you buy records from us, you already live inside this argument. House music is gospel and disco run through Chicago drum machines. Techno is Kraftwerk and P-Funk colliding in Detroit. Jungle is Jamaican soundsystem culture landing in London and being chopped into something no one in Kingston or Bristol had heard before. None of it stayed pure, and that's precisely why all of it survived. As Moraes puts it: "Culture that never touches another culture doesn't stay pure, it just stops adapting."
The essay is honest about the uneven ground, too. Contact between cultures has often meant extraction rather than exchange — Big Mama Thornton cut "Hound Dog" in 1952, and it took Elvis's version for the world to pay attention. Keeping culture also means keeping the receipts: knowing who made what, and making sure the credit and the money flow back to the source.
Jazz Is Dead is the working model
Which is why the label behind the essay matters as much as the essay itself. Jazz Is Dead — the series run by Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (yes, of A Tribe Called Quest) — doesn't reissue old records. It books the originators, many of them now in their seventies and eighties, into Younge's all-analogue Linear Labs studio in Los Angeles and cuts new albums with them, to tape, with full credit and billing.
Look at who's come through the series and you can see the manifesto in action. Marcos Valle, the bossa nova original, on JID003. Dom Salvador, the pianist who practically invented samba-funk, on JID024. Carlos Dafé, the voice of Brazil's Black Rio soul movement, on JID025. Antonio Carlos & Jocafi, the Bahian songwriting duo, on JID026. Then the West African wing: Ghanaian highlife master Ebo Taylor on JID022, and the late, towering Tony Allen — Fela's drummer, the pulse of Afrobeat — on JID018. Each record is a transculturation event: Rio and Accra and Lagos passing through an LA studio built like it's 1972, coming out the other side as something none of those cities could have made alone. And the JID20 remixes collection closes the loop, handing the catalogue to a new generation of producers to be devoured all over again.
