Shmazz

In the southwest Virginian city of Roanoke, the music scene reaches up to the mountains and out to the rolling fields. Sounds of bluegrass, folk, and jam bands permeate the festivals, breweries, and clubs. Outside of the prevalent Appalachian Americana are pockets where some of the most talented musicians in the area show up week after week to play blues, jazz, and soul gigs around town. It’s in these venues where Jamiel Allen and Willis Greenstreet met. Introduced first as strangers thrown together on stage, an immediate musical chemistry formed between Jamiel and Willis.
Jamiel - a keyboardist/vocalist/producer with Ecuadorian and Key West roots, steeped from youth in his family band’s commitment to Caribbean, Latin and Soul music. Willis - a Virginian guitarist/saxophonist born and raised on bluegrass in a Baptist preacher’s family, but later shaped his identity with the likes of Ray Charles, John Coltrane, and John Mayer. While the pandemic obliterated live music and performance, the online spaces and home studios became creative enclaves for these two contrasting musical minds to generate new possibilities- to create Shmazz.

Digging into the Shmazz song catalog feels like rummaging through the vintage vinyl section at a
disorganized record shop. On tracks like “To Belong”, a wall of Jamiel’s vocals in tight harmony affronts the listener, and eases into 90s hip hop beats, a funk foundation, and the general sense of being in outer space. With sober lyrics like, “it feels like it could all go wrong,” juxtaposing playful jazz flute lines, the track is a quintessential example of the alchemy of styles Shmazz concocts to produce a fresh sound.

Blues, r&b, and soul emerge in much more classic ways in “Don’t Fret”, while the floating sax melody
over the yacht-rock-meets-funk groove that is “Shteely Shtan” truly compels the listener to ask what strange type of jazz this might be.

So what is Shmazz? It could hearken to Jamiel’s view towards formal jazz training, of which he has not received but has organically absorbed through experience. Conversely, it may have to do with Willis’ traditional jazz training, and his ability to shirk the constraints of studied musical methods. Perhaps the name refers to the call for a more casual attitude towards the rigidity and constructs of musical styles.
Ultimately, Shmazz is the unlikely but fruitful partnership of two distinctly disparate musicians seeking to create a genre of their own.