POP MUSIC : Jazz and Rap Take the Plunge : An influential group of musicians is putting aside animosities for a marriage that promises a flock of sorely needed fresh musical ideas

Some strange noises are emanating from the conference room of the jazz label Blue Note, a sonic-boom detonation of hip-hop beats that threatens to rattle the framed photographs of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk in the adjoining room.

The sound--granite-hard dance beats under a dizzying melange of funk samples and white noise--has the unmistakable assault of a Public Enemy rap tune, except that in place of Chuck D.’s declamatory voice there is a screaming alto saxophone.

The track is “Streetjazz” from Greg Osby’s new “3-D Man,” an album unlike anything the Blue Note label has released in its 54-year history.

The sleeve features Osby in homeboy slouch and backward baseball cap, posed against an urban backdrop; the music inside features his sax skittering and sliding across body-slamming hip-hop rhythms supplied by Eric (Vietnam) Sadler, the former Public Enemy producer, and Ali Shaheed of Brooklyn rap group A Tribe Called Quest.

“I wanted to do a record that addressed hard-core hip-hop to the ultimate extreme, with me and the other musicians I incorporated playing at the full extent of their abilities,” says 32-year-old Osby, a founding member of the streetwise New York jazz collective known as M-BASE.

Osby calls “3-D Man” the first true marriage of hip-hop and jazz, which is probably immodest and definitely arguable. At least two records predate Osby’s effort by a year: “Doo-Bop” by Miles Davis, the late trumpeter’s collaboration with Brooklyn rapper/producer Easy Mo Bee, and the “The Antidote” by Ronny Jordan, a young British guitarist who coined the phrase “New Jazz Swing” to define the emerging genre.

But whoever thought of it first and whatever you call the end result, jazz and hip-hop are merging into a hot new hybrid. Following the lead of pioneers such as keyboard player Herbie Hancock, drummer Max Roach and Brooklyn rap duo Gang Starr, an influential group of jazz and rap musicians are casting aside long-held animosities and recognizing that they can offer each other sorely needed fresh ideas.

“It’s the first real significant new development . . . since Miles Davis went electric way back when,” says Guy Eckstine, vice president of artists and repertoire at Verve Records here. “To me it’s a way to bridge the generation gap in jazz and get kids back into the groove. It’s great to see hip-hop acts using real musicians and I think this live feel is the wave of the future.”

“Both genres--jazz and hip-hop--are at a standstill right now,” says Osby. “Nobody’s making the fresh move, the next move. But as soon as things start happening with this everyone will jump on the bandwagon.”

That bandwagon is getting ready to roll. Elektra/Pendulum will shortly release “Reachin’,” the debut album by Digable Planets, a New York rap trio that spins jazzy wordplays over drum and horn licks sampled from classic bebop recordings by the likes of Art Blakey and Cannonball Adderley.

In March, Chrysalis Records will release “Jazzmatazz,” a collaboration between rapper Guru of Gang Starr and jazz musicians such as Branford Marsalis, Courtney Pine, Donald Byrd and Roy Ayers. Meanwhile, Marsalis is planning his own collaboration with turntable scratch-mixer DJ Premier, the other half of Gang Starr.

It’s a symbiosis partly driven by hip-hop’s restless search for new sounds, particularly since tougher copyright enforcement has made it prohibitively expensive to sample sounds from existing records, which has been the core of most hip-hop music to date. In their search for new sounds, a lot of hip-hoppers are discovering that there is a young generation of jazz players who grew up listening to the same funkadelic and James Brown records they did.

“I was born in the ‘60s and I was a teen-ager in the ‘70s, when music was really hard,” says Branford Marsalis, who has collaborated with Public Enemy and Gang Starr in the past. “The thing I like about hip-hop--if it’s good music--is that it has that really hard sound. Whether you like it or hate it, it’s music that forces you to choose.”

Most jazz musicians, of course, choose to hate it, and even enthusiasts like Marsalis and Greg Osby admit that this particular musical marriage has its irreconcilable differences. Most rappers aren’t trained musicians and most jazz purists regard hip-hop’s lack of melody as an assault on their ears.

The result has been a wary standoff despite many attempts to find common ground. Indeed, nearly a decade has passed since keyboardist Herbie Hancock used a turntable scratcher on his jazz-fusion album “Rockit,” around the same time that the veteran jazz drummer Max Roach first began performing with the rapper Fab Five Freddy in New York.

Roach, 69, was present at the birth of bebop in the mid-1940s. He says he was struck by the similarities between jazz and hip-hop from the first moment he heard rap.

“Rap grew in the ‘hood, so to speak, it came out of the same environment that Louis Armstrong came out of,” says the drummer, who often incorporates rap into his live performances despite the opprobrium of his jazz peers. “These kids don’t have musical instruments or bands, they aren’t taught musical rhetoric at school and consequently they put their creative energy into doing something electronically . . . just like Louis Armstrong and Buddy Bolden, who weren’t privy to European conservatory training in New Orleans, latched on to the instruments they could find and developed their own way of playing them.”

Needless to say, any attempt to equate Ice-T with Louis Armstrong makes jazz purists apoplectic.

Indeed, despite the efforts of musicians such as Quincy Jones, whose 1989 album “Back on the Block” featured rappers working alongside jazz players, rap and jazz have been on entirely different trajectories since the mid-1980s. As rap rushed forward to embrace militant black politics and digital sampling, jazz began looking backward to acoustic instruments and the classical conservatism of Harry Connick Jr. and Wynton Marsalis.

The caustic criticism of conservatives like Connick, who once called rap music “despicable,” has certainly had an effect. Although most rappers would never admit it, they are intimidated at the prospect of working with jazz musicians. When Miles Davis picked Easy Mo Bee to co-produce his “Doo-Bop” project in 1991, the rapper’s reaction was immediate.

“I was afraid, I really was,” he admits with a laugh. “I didn’t want to be picked over, the way I had heard he treated the cats who play with him. He’s worked with composers like Gil Evans, and that stuff is tight, man. I was under pressure.”

Until “Doo-Bop,” much of the most fruitful jazz-rap chemistry had taken place in London, where young jazz musicians such as saxophonist Steve Williamson and keyboard player James Taylor plunged into dance music and helped create the “Acid Jazz” movement. American jazz-funk musicians such as trumpeter Byrd and vibes player Ayers have found a receptive young audience for their music in Britain and Europe.

“Donald Byrd and myself, when we were in the studio, talked about the similarities between the jazz era and the rap era, and the fact that they’re both black urban expressions,” says Guru, who first heard jazz at his parents’ house in Boston. “A jazz artist picking up an instrument and playing is like a rapper freestyling.”

Guru and DJ Premier are widely credited with awakening the hip-hop community’s interest in jazz when they recorded “Jazz Thing,” a collaboration with the Branford Marsalis Quartet, for the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s film “Mo’ Better Blues.” Still, Guru emphasizes that “Jazzmatazz” is an “experiment” and that he and Premier will stick to the turntables-and-rhymes format for future Gang Starr projects. Such caution reflects the fact that the hip-hop world, which scorns anyone who tries to dilute the music’s hard-core street essence, can be as doggedly purist as jazz.

Digable Planets, on the other hand, is looking for a more seamless integration of jazz and rap sensibilities. The group’s debut single, “Rebirth of Slick,” is about the commonality evident in black street culture from 1940s bebop to 1970s funk to 1990s rap. Over a walking acoustic bass and horn line sampled from Art Blakey’s “Stretchin,” lead rapper Butterfly declares, “ I groove like that / I’m smooth like that / I jive like that / I roll like that. . . . “

Something new to hip-hop, Butterfly is a young rapper who can discuss the horn section of Art Blakey’s classic 1960s quintet with as much ease as he discusses the boot-shaking beats on the last De La Soul album. A 23-year-old former engineering student, he grew up in a Brooklyn household where jazz was a constant presence on the radio, later learning alto sax in high school band at Washington State.

With two other rappers, 19-year-old Ladybug and 23-year-old Doodlebug, he has shaped Digable Planets into rap’s most overtly jazzy combo. Their impressive debut album, “Reachin,” samples from such diverse sources as Sonny Rollins, Kool and the Gang, the Crusaders and the Last Poets.

“Jazz songs are set up differently than hip-hop songs,” says Butterfly. “In a jazz song you have a chorus that’s played by the horns together, but then Lee Morgan is gonna lay out, Bobby Timmons is gonna lay out and Wayne Shorter is gonna lay out. You can’t do that sampling a beat and looping it, (so) we treat ourselves like the horns. We build off a bass line that has some changes in it, and then it’s us laying out over the bass as if we were the horns.”

“Jazz and hip-hop are very much alike in that jazz has its own dress, its own culture, its own mood, just like hip-hop does,” adds Ladybug, a Washington native whose parents are Brazilian. “Jazz came about through oppression and it was kind of like a voice for the people. That’s what ‘Rebirth of Slick’ is about.”

Even the most progressive jazz players, however, balk at such a direct comparison.

“Most rap groups and DJs don’t even play live; most of it’s done on tape,” says Branford Marsalis. “The reality is that most of these guys can’t play music and don’t have a musical sensibility, which is why they can take three harmonically opposed tracks and stick them together on the one thing.”

“A lot of the rappers, they’re self-appointed geniuses,” says Osby. “I mean, they put themselves on a pedestal and worship themselves through the braggadocio of the music. The founding fathers of jazz just did what they did because it was honest and personal and they felt compelled or committed to doing it. A lot of the rappers, they’re young guys, they haven’t really lived life and they don’t really know what they’re talking about.”

Osby ran up against the mutual mistrust that permeates the jazz and hip-hop worlds when he set out to make “3-D Man.” Executives at Blue Note initially balked at the cost and experimental nature of the project, then several hip-hop producers refused to work with him. “They were afraid of being dogged by their hip-hop peers, or I guess the thought of dealing with live musicians was out of the question,” says Osby. Eric Sadler and Ali Shaheed eventually signed on, although not without lowering their usual production fees to accommodate the restricted budgets of the jazz world.

Before making “3-D Man,” Osby had bought a turntable and sampler to learn hip-hop techniques firsthand, enabling him to co-produce the album. He also tested his ideas in London last year by jamming onstage with a DJ and several rappers, a collaboration he hopes to repeat on a U.S. tour this year following the record’s release. Together with Steve Coleman, his sax-playing collaborator in the M-BASE collective, Osby has formed a record company called Funk Mob which aims to release dance records employing rappers and jazz players.

“I respect hip-hop artists--the really good ones, the profound ones--as my equals,” says the saxophonist. “Their canvas is the turntable and the sampler and mixers; they do aural collages and reconstructions of pre-existing material. I wanted to deal with things that way because it’s raw and it’s very intuitive.”

The real test of the new jazz-swing thing will occur onstage, where the two genres meet without a safety net. Branford Marsalis discovered the dangers of this balancing act when he got up on stage to jam with Gang Starr one night and realized that DJ Premier was scratch-mixing in a nebulous pitch somewhere between G and G-sharp. “It was a train wreck,” recalls the saxophonist.

Indeed, the chasm that separates jazz from rap can become manifest onstage, where the jazz player’s passion for improvising chafes under the tyranny of the booming dance beats. That’s a contradiction that Osby, Digable Planets and Gang Starr will have to resolve before they take to the stage in the coming months.

Ever the optimist, Max Roach is still setting hip-hop cats among the jazz pigeons. At a memorial service for Miles Davis last year at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Harlem, he got Fab Five Freddy to rap over the music from Davis’ classic late-1950s quintet recordings. As usual, that raised the hackles of some of Roach’s peers in the jazz world.

“I know some of the bigger (jazz) guys; we all came up together, and they used to look at James Brown funny, too,” Roach says. “I try to explain to them that these kids aren’t trying to compete with them by playing trumpet as good as Wynton Marsalis. They’re trying to compete with what they know and with the instruments they have available. Some of my friends who are prominent in the jazz world, I say to them: ‘You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that.’ ”