{"id":1558,"date":"2022-02-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-18T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sofarsoundsblo.wpengine.com\/blog\/articles\/new-music-alert-featured-artist-fkajazz\/"},"modified":"2022-02-18T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-02-18T00:00:00","slug":"new-music-alert-featured-artist-fkajazz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/articles\/new-music-alert-featured-artist-fkajazz","title":{"rendered":"New Music Alert Featured Artist: FKAjazz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Samir Zarif, aka FKAjazz (short for Formerly Known As), is not afraid to try new sounds. The born-and-raised Texan, now residing in NYC, makes music that doesn\u2019t adhere to a single genre.\u00a0Sometimes it\u2019s jazz, or hip-hop, or electronic, but mostly it\u2019s just Samir in the moment, and his friends. The freedom to experiment has kept the artist busy\u2013\u00a0he had ten releases last year, and so far in 2022 he\u2019s put out <em>Saxually Active, Vol. 1<\/em>, <em>FK3<\/em>, and has an NFT-based electronic release coming up at the end of the month. We got to chat with FKAjazz about composing, DJing, and exploring new sounds. <\/p>\n<p>(Revisit FKAjazz and other dynamic Sofar artists on our <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/playlist\/7qjXrK9g78aj1CXHAVmD66?si=b9d0268acbd84713\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">February New Music Alert Playlist<\/a>) <\/p>\n<p><strong>Sofar: Right off the bat, I want to know how you arrived at your moniker, FKAjazz.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>FKAjazz: I\u2019ve been playing saxophone since I was about 8. When you\u2019re a saxophonist, the first thing you\u2019re taught is jazz. I love that music, that I was able to learn how to improvise and how to communicate with other musicians on the bandstand. But, I grew up in the hip-hop era, electronica era, [and] after a few years of doing the tour thing with different jazz groups, I was like \u2018this is cool, but it\u2019s not really my passion.\u2019 I got to do this collaboration with a friend, and that led to this deep dive into producing music\u2013\u00a0more electronica, house music. After a few years of doing that, I decided to create an artist name. I decided on FKAjazz because everything, if you think about it, was jazz. That for me was an aha moment. I never wanted to peg myself as just a jazz musician, or just do one type of music\u2013 I could keep creating based on how I felt.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><strong>That\u2019s interesting, that was part of my second question\u2013\u00a0your bio mentions exploring electronic music, and taking that experience into Black American music to create personal compositions. It sounds like that was part of the process?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Definitely. As life is, it\u2019s kind of a zig-zag, it\u2019s never a straight line. It was through collaborations that I gravitated to one thing or the next. The first person I really learned from how to produce music was heavily into electronica. Because of that, that&#8217;s the type of music I was learning how to create. And when I wanted to move onto the next chapter, that\u2019s where I started to take everything I learned and bring it together into something I felt was closer to, really diving into my own foundation of how I grew up\u2013 I was in school learning jazz, but I was at home listening to Tupac and Snoop Dog.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><strong>Your approach to music feels so collaborative and communal, I\u2019d like to know about what the live performance experience is like for you.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s really fun, to say the least. Especially now, I\u2019m doing a lot more DJing. It\u2019s so fun to tell my friends, \u2018I have a DJ set coming up, let\u2019s have you on for a couple songs.\u2019 I\u2019ll get DMs all the time for people that want to collaborate, and 9 times out of 10 they don\u2019t work out for some reason, but the ones that do, they end up working out because those people become a part of my life. With those people, like BD3, Uncle Nephew, Marcus Machado, Brooke D, these are all people that\u2019ve become an integral part of my life. The idea of collaborating and taking it to the performance is a no brainer.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/13ni2nEPwlk\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe> <\/div>\n<p><strong>I was curious about your work as a DJ, and how your composer self and instrumentalist self come into that performance.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I DJ and play saxophone at the same time. It\u2019s really fun to be able to in a way shock people when they come to a club and I\u2019m performing and all of the sudden my saxophone is above the DJ booth. I kind of in a way reinvent the track. When I do a Sofar gig, I\u2019m usually DJing and playing saxophone, and I&#8217;ll have one or two featured artists.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><strong>What\u2019s your experience with Sofar been like?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s really amazing. Not only do I get the opportunity to perform for a crowd full of people that\u2019ve never heard of me\u2013 which is great for my own development, getting to connect with more people\u2013\u00a0but the really fun part is that every Sofar I\u2019ve ever attended, I\u2019m always falling in love with the other performers, because they\u2019re always different. Grace [Pozniak], who books New York, I think she\u2019s the mastermind behind putting these together, so big shoutout to Grace. My experience has always been such a discovery. All my friends are doing Sofar gigs. It\u2019s easy to get, especially now, bogged down by doing zoom calls all day, not being able to go into a studio with the band, feeling the angst. The Sofar community has really been holding strong through all of this and it\u2019s been really beautiful.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Photo credit: FKAjazz, photo by Noah MacNeil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Samir Zarif, aka FKAjazz (short for Formerly Known As), is not afraid to try new sounds. The born-and-raised Texan, now residing in NYC, makes music that doesn\u2019t adhere to a single genre.\u00a0Sometimes it\u2019s jazz, or hip-hop, or electronic, but mostly it\u2019s just Samir in the moment, and his friends. The freedom to experiment has kept [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1559,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","category-new-music-alert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}