Jazz

Summary: On Straight08, three longtime collaborators blend post-bop jazz, 808-driven grooves, collective improvisation and contemporary digital influences into one of the most original and forward-looking jazz albums of the year.

Straight08 Review: A Bold Fusion of Jazz Tradition and 808 Innovation

These three jazz musketeers have known each other since their university days. Between them, they boast discographies totaling more than 400 recordings, including influential contributions from Taylor Eigsti Barsh as both performer and composer on landmark albums such as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, Anderson .Paak’s Malibu, and Kanye West’s Donda. Their reunion on Straight08 feels less like a new project than the culmination of a creative conversation that has been unfolding for years. By fusing the language of traditional jazz with the unmistakable pulse of the iconic 808 drum machine and placing collective improvisation at the center of the music, the trio creates a striking bridge between jazz’s past and its future.

What emerges is a sound that feels distinctly their own: urban, intricate, and deliberately unpredictable. Traditionalists may struggle with some of the album’s more adventurous turns, but approaching Straight08 through the lens of convention risks missing its greatest strengths. To my ears, the music often resembles a post-bop ensemble wandering into territories once explored by the Italian progressive rock group Goblin, whose eerie and imaginative soundtracks helped define the cinematic world of filmmaker Dario Argento during the 1970s.

This is not an album that rewards passive listening. It asks the listener to surrender, to set aside familiar reference points and resist the temptation to categorize every influence as it appears. Only then does the world constructed by these musicians reveal itself in full. Once you stop trying to map the terrain, you can simply inhabit it.

The origins of Straight08 stretch back to the years when Barsh and drummer Mark Guiliana were students at William Paterson University. Alongside guitarist Dan Hindman, they formed a groove-oriented ensemble called The Corrugation, a group built around rhythmic exploration and open-ended improvisation. Shortly after graduation, trumpeter Keyon Harrold joined them for a performance in New Jersey as a special guest. While each musician eventually pursued a separate career, their professional paths continued to intersect. Barsh has recalled that Harrold frequently returned to the idea of reviving The Corrugation whenever they met, a suggestion that lingered in the background for years before finally finding its expression here.

One of the album’s defining characteristics is its refusal to let the listener settle. The rhythm section often seems to follow its own trajectory while the melody dances freely above it. Nowhere is this more evident than on “The Earl of Essex County.” Just as the listener begins to find a foothold, the musical landscape shifts beneath them. The balance changes, the scenery transforms, and assumptions formed in the opening moments quickly become obsolete. A hip-hop-inflected rhythmic pulse suddenly emerges, pushing the music into territory that can feel surprisingly close to the atmosphere of a video game soundtrack. Certainty and uncertainty coexist. Musical ideas advance and retreat in constant motion.

In many ways, this is a distinctly twenty-first-century form of jazz. It is difficult to imagine a project like this taking shape in the previous century. The rise of gaming culture, digital aesthetics, and genre-fluid listening habits has left an imprint on contemporary music, and traces of that cultural shift can be heard throughout Straight08. Rather than rejecting those influences, the trio embraces them as part of its creative vocabulary.

From my perspective, the album reaches its highest point with “The Corrugation.” It is here that the many cultural threads woven throughout the record become most fully integrated and confidently expressed. Jazz, electronic textures, groove-based improvisation, cinematic atmosphere, and digital-age sensibilities all converge into a cohesive statement. The track feels less like a conclusion than a blueprint for what might come next.

Straight08 is an album that deserves immediate attention for its originality alone. Yet it is also a work in progress in the most positive sense of the term. At times, the record resembles a patchwork of ideas, perhaps reflecting an overabundance of technological possibilities that have not yet been distilled into their most refined form. But pioneering a genuinely new musical language outside established traditions is an extraordinarily difficult undertaking. It requires experimentation, risk-taking, and above all, time. If Straight08 occasionally reveals the seams of its own construction, it is only because the trio is attempting something few contemporary jazz artists dare to pursue: the creation of a new synthesis rather than the refinement of an existing one.

That ambition alone makes the album one of the more intriguing and forward-looking jazz releases in recent memory.

Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News

PARIS-MOVE, June 17th, 2026

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Website – Sam Barsh
Website – Mark Guiliana
Website – Keyon Harrold

Musicians :
Sam Barsh, keyboards
Keyon Harrold, trumpeter
Mark Guiliana, drums

Track Listing:
Todd 4
Little Sunflower
The Earl Of Essex County
East Flatbush Pimp Walk
Fergumette Park
Green Chimneys
Todd 5
Straight08
Keys To The Suburb
The Corrugation
Green Chimneys (Reprise)