If you play at bars or clubs with one set format, your hands are pretty much tied when it comes to changing up the musical genres in your set. If you play a hip hop club, you’re expected to play hip hop, if it’s techno night, you’d better spin techno all night. If you have more leeway in what you play, you may want to consider slipping some jazz songs into your mix. That may seem daunting, as jazz can seem very inaccessible and perhaps at odds with modern pop music sensibilities, but when carefully chosen, and correctly mixed, a few jazz tracks can invigorate your audience and set you apart from your peers.

Jazz has gone through a lot of phases and sounds in the century or so that it has existed. I often mix in jazz tracks from the ’40s and ’50s, and find ways to incorporate some hard bop, and even modal jazz, into my sets. If you’re just starting to dabble in including the art form, however, I would gravitate towards the jazz/rock/funk fusion sound of the 1970s. To a jazz purist, it’s among the worst jazz ever recorded, but from a DJ’s standpoint, and in relation to modern pop, it’s the best choice. Most jazz fusion songs are percussion-heavy, and nearly all are in 4/4, which is going to make integrating it into your set much easier; and, it was simplified for the rock/funk audience.

Bona fied jazz masters like Herbie Hancock and Donald Byrd sold out, in the opinion of most jazz fans, and started making dumbed down jazz for the masses that was jazz in name only, but those are the records that became the cornerstone of hip hop in the ’90s “diggin’ in the crates” era, and tracks that can become cornerstones in your newly-jazzified DJ sets. But where to start? Permit me to suggest some songs. You can mine those tracks for five or six danceable, easy to mix songs that still sound like jazz to the average listener.

Consider:

Who’s Making Love? – Lou Donaldson
“T” Plays it Cool – Marvin Gaye
Matrix – Dizzy Gillespie
Harlem River Drive – Bobbi Humphrey
Westchester Lady – Bob James
Mister Magic – Grover Washington Jr.
Fourty Days – Billy Brooks
Tequila Mockingbird – Ramsey Lewis

Those are all jazz fusion tracks with beats you will find familiar, but will sound refreshing to your crowd. And, they’re in the same rough tempo range, so mixing between them in perhaps two sets shouldn’t be too difficult. And once you familiarize yourself with the tracks above, you will no doubt begin to find other jazz tracks that work equally well, or better, in your sets.

One caveat: the above songs, and nearly all jazz songs, are performed by live musicians using real instruments. They aren’t quantized into a lockstep computerized rhythm, so you’ll need to focus on your mix, and pay attention to minor tempo shifts throughout each song. Or, harken back to this previous blog, and learn how to quantize tracks for easy, perfect mixing.