The Adam Deitch Quartet

On the heels of massive successes with his main projects Lettuce and Break Science, celebrated collaborations with jazz guitar luminary John Scofield, and high profile hip-hop production placements with the likes of 50 Cent, Talib Kweli, and Redman, GRAMMY-nominated drummer/producer Adam Deitch finally unveils Egyptian Secrets, the long-awaited debut LP from his Adam Deitch Quartet.  A fluid expression of the funkier side of soul-jazz, Deitch and his curated collective hint at the avant-garde, but stay grounded in warm traditions. AD4 adventures through the vibrant forest of late 60’s Verve and Blue Note cool, respectfully mining the essential elements of what makes a great hip-hop break, and then Deitch reimagines them in his own contemporary context.

Adam Deitch is among the preeminent drummers in contemporary music today, having been featured in Modern Drummer multiple times, among myriad accolades across several genres for nearly 25 years. The only child born to two funk drummers, Deitch grew up just outside New York City in a home that celebrated all genres and eras of music - not the least of which jazz and it’s numerous subgenres. As such, Deitch was exposed to a plethora of legendary musicians and generational icons throughout his formative years; he studied at the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston in the late 1990’s before joining Average White Band at 19 years old. He credits the development of his jazzier vocabulary and arranging to studying with a collection of influential teachers during his formative years , a brilliance which rears it’s ambitious, majestic head on Egyptian Secrets two decades later.

“I grew up in NY, was raised to appreciate the culture of jazz music and what it represents. As I got schooled by cats like Jeff Watts, Mark Simmons and Charles Haynes, they showed me something beautiful about going into a small, special place and taking people for a ride. It’s a musical culture that I appreciate and I wanted to be part of it.“

In December 2013, after a Lettuce show at the Fillmore, Deitch connected with Bay Area organist Wil Blades. They played together for a late night jam at a popular haunt Boom Boom Room in San Francisco, and there was an instant chemistry. Blades had come up in the Chicago blues scene, before relocating to the West Coast. There, he studied and performed with venerable Hammond organ virtuosos Dr. Lonnie Smith and Ronnie Foster, titans of this specific brand of late 60’s/early 70’s B3-bolstered rare groove and jazz funk. Of note, these are the same type of collectives that Idris Muhammed often had manned the drums for several decades earlier.  Blades had also performed for several years with Mike Clark, drummer of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters and another hero of Deitch’s. Adam had already conceptualized this sort of project in his head for several years, and even had explored a couple of those ideas with Lettuce on occasion, but in Blades, finally he had a collaborator with whom to pursue this particular avenue.

After establishing a rock solid rapport and common goal with Blades, Deitch reached out to his trusty cohorts Ryan Zoidis (saxophones) and Eric Benny Bloom (trumpet), aka The Lettuce Horns. Both players are well versed in the groove-jazz aesthetic with the vocabularies to match; the duo solidified the AD4 lineup and soon the drummer’s long dreamt-of, organ-driven groove quartet was born. Before Lettuce exploded, Zoidis was a veteran of Portland, Maine underground phenoms Rustic Overtones, as well as a frequent collaborator with jazz-funk stalwarts Soulive during their most prolific years. People have primarily heard Zoidis funking out in the Maceo zone, but AD4 finds the saxophonist reaching toward both Hank Mobley and Bennie Maupin. On Egyptian Secrets, Zoidis is expanding on his harmonic concept, all the while injecting things with synth-augmented colorscapes that have become a calling card.

Eric Benny Bloom is schooled in jazz of all styles and eras, as he vigorously studied the various annals of the genre in the collegiate environment, and gigged internationally in a vast array of smaller jazz settings, long before he joined Lettuce in 2012. Being called upon to lend his talents in a  Lee Morgan or Donald Byrd style was right in his wheelhouse, and Bloom hit the ground running, he too incorporating his outsized musical personality to inhabit Deitch’s pocket-laden concoctions that come to life on Egyptian Secrets. 

“The Adam Deitch Quartet isn’t exactly jazz, it has some elements, but I see it as the funkier side of things. It might be soul jazz, or funky jazz, that’s not for me to decide. I’ve dedicated the record to one of the greatest drummers to ever live, the legend Idris Muhammed, from New Orleans. On Egyptian Secrets, that’s where I’m coming from; I want to pay homage to that place that he created and lived in.”

The fledgeling band began by performing exclusively covers, a selection of timeless tunes from Grant Green, Jimmy Smith, Cannonball Adderley and even Michael Jackson, the quartet traversing warm arrangements of familiar classics, songs levitating somewhere between jazz and funk. Firmly ensconced in the rare-groove idiom, AD4 channeled and established a vibe, and then Deitch began to carefully integrate his own masterful compositions to their repertoire; slowly but surely, Egyptian Secrets began to take shape. But not before a superhero would jump into the frey; guitarist and jazz immortal John Scofield, who once tapped a young Deitch to be his co-pilot on his celebrated Uberjam efforts, wanted in on the action. Before long, the prodigious axe-man had contributed to five songs on the LP, and his patented jazz-fusion serenade informs the identity of Egyptian Secrets in subtle, nuanced fashion. 

“This is an organic record, with no effects, we didn’t do any editing or post-production, drums, organ and horns. It’s either the first or second take of every song, so there’s some real vibe, it’s really alive, and usually that’s where the best samples are coming from.”

If funky groove jazz was Idris’s landmark zip code, then dusty golden-era hip-hop is where this funky drummer resides, The culture and ethos of hip-hop pulsates through anything Adam Deitch touches, and Egyptian Secrets follows in his established traditions. The LP finds Deitch unveiling a fluidity in rhythm and the knack for an impactful melodies that are not just core elements of jazz, but the essential DNA of boom-bap’s chopped sample. AD4’s songcraft is abundant in passages and breakbeats that were born to be chopped into samples, literally. Egyptian Secrets is ripe with Intriguing original compositions with contemporary hip-hop influences subtly snaking into the mix,

“Every song has something to sample, and I want to create a bunch of records that sound like dusty, old soul jazz records, the kind you pull out of a bin in the basement of a shop, the type of shop where you have to wear a dust mask because it’s so disgusting down there, but that’s where the diggers find the gems, covered in dust mites. On Egyptian Secrets, I am trying to bring back that vibe.”