Da Jamz turns old tapes into a new genre.

With everyone owning an iPod or MP3 player, cassette tapes have become the antiques of the music industry. Not many of us even own a cassette player anymore. Nevertheless, Hybrid, the latest project
by Jean Michel Ou, aka Da Jamz, was inspired by a box of old cassette tapes of Beijing opera recorded by his grandmother in the ’60s.

Born in Paris, Jean Michel grew up under the influence of Chinese opera. Every weekend his family would gather to play music, sing and dance. His grandmother even hired Jean Michel an erhu teacher. Although unable to fully understand the songs’ lyrics, he would happily sing along with his grandmother and mother. Yet even as the music infiltrated his blood, it played its part in an early identity crisis.

“I wasn’t sure if I was Chinese or French until my 20s. My parents are Shanghaiese but the first time I stepped into the city was in my 30s,” he says – though that may not have been such a bad thing. For years, Da Jamz wanted to blend traditional Chinese music with the likes of hip-hop, jazz and whatever other music he was into. However, he was never really satisfied with the results. Then, when salon Hair Corner invited him to produce a 10-minute soundtrack to their show in the Tokyo Beauty Expo last June, a new door opened – the salon liked his composition so much they commissioned an album to play in their branches.

“I just called my mum in France and asked her to send me the tapes my grandmother recorded in the ’60s,” he says, and opens a box of a dozen tapes he considers a family treasure. Each is carefully marked with the titles of its songs and the year they were recorded. To the modern ear, they sound old and, dare we say it, a bit nasty, like kids pretending to be music geniuses and making their own mix tapes, or recording their favourite hits straight off the radio. “I think they recorded [the music] just with a recorder without a microphone,” says the musician. “But thanks to modern technology, I can now transfer the music into the computer, master and digitize it.”
The album title Hybrid is self-explanatory. Segments from the Beijing opera recordings are cut and pasted into hip-hop, chill out, trip-hop, R&B or even Brazilian music. Da Jamz does not think this is an east-meets-west cliché: he considers it a marriage between the historical and the contemporary. “I am not promoting Beijing opera. It is just something from my family that I treasure and a tribute to my grandmother. I am blending the old with the new and trying to make it not sound awkward.”

Of the 10 tracks on the album, the up-tempo Empty Castle is Da Jamz’ favourite, the one he considers key to the album. The Beijing opera from which the sample is lifted is based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms from Chinese classical literature, the track was the first produced for the album and set the tone and direction of the record. “[Empty Castle] was one of the first songs I listened to during my childhood,” says Da Jamz. “Now when I listen to some of the loops and rhythms, I just feel so close to it.”