Local group Jip Jop reflects on influences, origins

A conglomeration of styles definable by an excess of genre titles, local late-night musical sensation Jip Jop features technically-versed musicians trained by the Jacobs School of Music and influenced by old-school cassettes. Frontman Ben Gershman holds it down with concise, percussive rapping, spitting words faster than a clicking bicycle gear, with seamless transitions to melodic singing smoother than syrup. Ryan Imboden on trumpet and Davis Jones on saxophone come together to form the horn section, while the rhythm section is composed of Bobby Wooten on the five-stringed bass and Matt Margeson on the kit. Ben Bolasny on keys applies years of classical and jazz expertise to pull the whole orchestration together for local bar appearances and house parties.

The Origin Story

The seedlings of Jip Jop were planted when Bolasny, Imboden, and Margeson began playing jazz together in the IU residence halls as freshmen and established the Ryan Imboden Quintet. It was in these performances that frontman Gershman first saw his future bandmates.

“During my Jazz for the Listener class with Luke Gillespie the first semester of my freshman year, these guys would come and perform in sort of rag-type groups,” Gerhman said. “I saw them play and I thought, ‘Damn, how amazing would it be if I could play in a band with these guys?’”

It was a pure geographical coincidence that ultimately brought all of the members of this supergroup together. Within a year of these classroom encounters, Gershman discovered he in fact lived next door to the three jazz jammers and Jones lived in the apartment below.

“We all just got together at one of our parties and kicked it, listened to music and started playing, and that’s basically how Jip Jop got started,” Margeson said.
Each instrumentalist in the group was at IU pursuing a Jacobs School of Music degree, creating a technically strong foundation in jazz and classical styles. Gershman, a telecommunications major, has been writing and recording since high school and brought his unique style to the group.

“Jip Jop is sort of the quest to take the whole hip-hop formula to the next level by adding the jazz and the technical complexities of jazz to it,” Gershman said.

Band members say the fusion of the two styles was not the spoken intention of the group, but was the inevitable result of each of their training, influences and passions.

“The characteristics of the sound that we are making onstage sonically, I think they are kind of in the vein of acoustic music, but our mindset is of a hip-hop track” of loops and repetitive beats, Margeson said. “Having that mindset that we are laying down a track, but sonically because we are playing our live instruments, we are still in the traditions of R&B, blues and jazz.”

Influences

Musical inspiration can come from anywhere, but for this group, the true stimulus is the ideal nostalgic cassette tapes the band members cherished as children.

“As far as hip-hop goes, I had two cassettes when I was a kid,” Bolasny said. “One of them had A Tribe Called Quest, Deltron 3030, and two Digable Planets tracks. Then I had another cassette that was Arrested Development, and I knew every word on that album.”

After Jip Jop’s Saturday performance at the Bluebird Nightclub, Gershman’s mother, Nancy, detected the influence of the cassettes she purchased for her son early in his childhood.

“I remember the very first rap I got Benny was Digable Planets, and tonight I was having a flashback. I was feeling that coming through there,” Nancy Gershman said.
But that was no flashback. That was the heavy influence of Butterfly and Q-Tip from those long-lost cassettes.

“They are very creative and lyrically-minded rappers,” said Gershman, discussing the musicians’ effects on his own style. They, among other influences such as Beck and Neil Young, have communicated a vital concept to Gershman. “The idea that you don’t necessarily have to have lyrics that are completely aligned to one idea — you can sort of stray and speak in a nonsensical language almost to make rapping more of a percussive dialogue rather than rapping a certain idea or notion.”

One challenge the group said it faces is the replication of beats and loops that were originally created on drum machines and computers.

“All the early hip-hop stuff — Dilla started producing A Tribe Called Quest and all of the Digable Planets stuff — they’re just sampling musicians playing this stuff live, and they just loop it,” Imboden said. “We’re sampling this stuff, but we’re actually playing it.”

When it comes to keeping a beat solid, it’s all up to the rhythm section.

“Unless it’s more like the intellectual producers, it will be the same loops that just keep going,” Wooten said, “so we definitely improvise on it but stay true to the hip-hop aspect of it.”

Wooten had his own cassettes that inspired the development of his bass-playing career.

“Stevie Wonder cassettes — that’s all I listened to for a long time. When I did pick up the bass, the first stuff I learned was a lot of the Stevie Wonder charts, and he became one of my favorite bass players, James Jamerson,” Wooten said, referring to the bassist for Stevie Wonder’s ensemble. “His style is one of the most important traits of all the Motown stuff.”

Wooten held true to his word and invoked the power of Jamerson during the group’s Saturday performance. During Jip Jop’s collaborations with Ben Jackson, a.k.a. DJ Action Jackson, the group played a three-song Motown medley featuring a Stevie Wonder cover.

The percussive nature of Gershman’s vocal style was complemented by DJ Action Jackson’s improvisational scratching. It was yet another example of two styles these musicians have seamlessly fused.

“Miles Davis was always huge, and Charles Mingus was actually the first CD I bought,” Imboden said. “For Mingus, it was just his whole swagger — he has such an attitude behind everything that he plays. You know exactly what his intentions are.

“And Miles was just, like, the coolest dude ever. I read his autobiography in high school and was listening to every single one of his albums.”

Imboden wowed the audience Saturday with his trumpet solo during the final song, the opening of which reflected the loose, interpretive style of Miles Davis while transforming into a staccato, scale-running crowd-pleaser.

Saxophonist Jones named Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie among his early influences but denied a prominent reflection of them in his performance methods.

“I never really learned Bebop as far as me playing,” Jones said, “but I was always very well aware of the overall general technique and sound and the overall fluidity of how you can make this sound — just having such knowledge about the harmonic structure of a chord progression and essentially just having the technique to play whatever it is you want to play and have it be a roller coaster of ideas.”

Some of the group members are apples that haven’t fallen far from the tree, raised by musicians to become musicians. But others were seeded in contrasting environments.

“I’m the only person in my family who is a musician, but my dad is a music lover,” Margeson said. “He has thousands of records. When he was in school he was a DJ, so he had all these stories for me, and when I kind of told him I was thinking about doing the school band he really encouraged me.

“We would listen to records, all kinds of things, from The Beatles to Buddy Holly to Miles Davis to everything you could ever think of.”

Saturday’s Bluebird performance

Anyone with a solid object in his pocket could feel the bass vibrations as Jip Jop took the stage Saturday at the Bluebird.

Wooten, serving as the audience’s adrenaline rush, joined DJ Action Jackson at the beginning of Jip Jop’s first set. The two acts had rehearsed this transition together, creating a seamless flux from beat-bumping DJ to energetic live performance.

“It wouldn’t work if they weren’t good musicians,” Jackson said. “It’s a lot more complicated than it looks to get the phrasing right.”

Jackson is now a full-time DJ. He primarily plays regionally but has traveled for gigs in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia.

“We’ve worked with several DJs over the past few years, but he is just a great musically-minded DJ,” Gershman said.

DJ Action Jackson’s smooth transitions before and after each set kept the crowd rattling between Jip Jop’s performances.

“I think they connect with the audience very well — it’s a tremendous balance,” said Anatole Gershman, Ben Gershman’s father. Both of Ben Gershman’s parents were in attendance Saturday night, and anyone who saw them moving and grooving during the performance could tell they were enthused. Nancy Gershman said she thought it was the fusion of the old-school hip-hop styles with a sophisticated horn section that kept everyone dancing.

“There is definitely a void that needs to be filled by a live band such as Jip Jop,” Ben Gershman said. “People are looking for the live band experience, and I think we have the right recipe.”

What the future holds in store

For members of the Bloomington community who have found themselves becoming devoted Jip Jop soldiers, opportunities to get a fix are becoming increasingly sparse.

“Basically end of August, early September, we are all moving to Chicago — except for Bobby, who will be staying here,” Gershman said. “I grew up in Chicago. I love that city. I think right now it is wide open in terms of entertainment — there is definitely an opening for new artists to come out there.”

But hold on, fans — not all hope is lost. Jip Jop has scheduled performances throughout the summer and fall at the Bluebird, and the group has agreed to weather the commute to satisfy the desires of its established fan base.

“The shows you play are integral to the growth of your success, which took us a while to understand, and now that we do, hopefully we can use that knowledge when we get to Chicago,” Bolasny said. “I’m really excited to see what happens when we get there.”

The Windy City is also home to the studio where Jip Jop has been recording material for their debut album. The group has developed enough content for the album but is struggling with issues of replication and distribution.

“Basically the market for selling music is changing, and that is something we are going to have to consider,” Bolasny said of the decreasing importance of album sales.
“The game is changing right now, and we are changing with the game.”