Name: Bastien Keb
Nationality: British
Occupation: Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, lecturer
Current Release: Bastien Keb joins forces with Confucius MC for their collaborative album Songs For Lost Travellers, out February 7th via Shabaka Hutchings's Native Rebel.

[Read our Concert report of Shabaka Hutchings's performance at Berlin's XJazz! Festival.

If you enjoyed these thoughts by Bastien Keb and would like to know more about his music, visit him on Instagram, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and Facebook.

For a deeper dive, we recommend our earlier Bastien Keb interview.



What were some of the musical experiences which planted a seed for your interest in hip hop?

I was playing in a sorta funk jam band and our singer and bass player left. The drummer suggested getting in some friends he went to school with who were rappers. It worked out nicely and those rappers are still some of my best friends.

They would always be playing Outkast, Ghostface at practices so those sessions were eye opening.

Where do most of your inspirations to create come from–rather from internal impulses or external ones? Which current social / political / ecological or other developments make you feel like you need to respond as an artist?

Inspiration is purely internal for me.

I respect artists who use their craft for the betterment of society but for me my music is an escape, like a dream.

What role do electronic tools and instruments, including AI, play for your creative process?

I don’t like or respect any of that stuff. If you’re using AI to make something creative you’re obviously not creative and should go and do something else.

Creating is meant to be fun and interesting why would you outsource that to AI. Why would you lose out on a chance to find out what you are capable of creating.

There has always been a close connection between hip hop and jazz. What role does improvisation play in your current creative process?

The way I write a track naturally uses a lot of Improvisation, to find a top melody or horn line, or improvising a bass line until I find the correct pattern.

So improvisation is ever present in the writing process.

For many artists, life-changing musical experiences take place live. How do you see that yourself?

Life affirming but not life changing.

Live is always a unique experience, cuz you’re sharing a specific moments in a room with complete strangers, which makes it a unique special thing. Gives you a little faith in humanity.

From Star Wars via The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to the Fifth Element, there have always been amusing sci fi ideas about how music could look likeat some point. For a not too distant future, where do you personally see it going?

As the world gets crazier the more music and art is needed to distract from life, at the very least you need to be able to escape sometimes. So I can imagine consuming music through fully immersive VR experiences become the norm.

How, would you say are your live performances and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?

Because I play all the instruments on my recordings but live I play with other musicians, it’s interesting to see how the band build and emphasise different elements of their parts. This often inspires me on newer tracks.