Talking jazz with Flying Lotus' Steven Ellison
FlyLo on family ties, Herbie Hancock, and finding his own lane as an artist
Still soaring high from his latest album, last year's Until the Quiet Comes, Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) returns for another round of cartoonish beats, tones, and drones. His latest offering, a one-off 8-bit jam for Cartoon Network's "Adventure Time" dubbed "About that time//A glitch is a glitch," dives headlong into the phantasmal aesthetics of video game psychedelia. Likewise, his "Layer 3" stage show is a hallucinatory swirl of lights, morphing shapes, and mind-melting eye and ear candy.
Flying Lotus plays Masquerade tonight (Tues., April 23) with Thundercat and Teebs. $20. 8 p.m. 695 North Ave. 404-577-8178. www.masq.com.
I recently caught the video on your Facebook page in which you're hanging out with Herbie Hancock and Thundercat in a studio. Are you guys working on an album?
Oh... Yeah. ... I'm working on a jazz album right now. It's different ... It's really ... I want it to be like a real jazz record, like a bop record, and I want it to be an experimental record, you know what I mean?
Yeah, not like something you'd hear at a fancy restaurant?
Exactly. I want it to be a record that when you hear it, you feel it, and you can put everything that you have into it. I'm mostly just producing it, and not really playing too many instruments. But that all depends on the track, and what we're working on. I don't want this to sound like some cocktail jazz shit, I want it to be more like ... Miles Davis' In A Silent Way ...