Photo by Janette Beckman
jharis yokley
Sometimes, Late At Night is the stunning, genre-traversing debut from drumming virtuoso, Jharis Yokley. Yokley-who has worked with everyone from Solange and Chance the Rapper to Ani DiFranco and DJ Premier-calls upon his jazz-informed chops and hip-hop sensibilities to craft this colorful and adventurous album. Like many great works of art, Sometimes, Late At Night was initially inspired by a breakup.
“So, the album’s mainly about this relationship,”Yokley explains. “It's not like that I regret ending it, but I knew it had to happen. But reminiscing back on those times, I was wondering if I made a mistake.”
The inevitable fear and uncertainty that follows a breakup is palpable throughout the album’s 10 tracks. The lyrics are minimal, often taking the form of brief lines that are sung repeatedly like a self-soothing mantra. Yokley’s words throughout the record are sparse but each song conveys its own rich world of emotion. The lyrics on songs like “Friends”, “Move On” and “Miss You”, feel like things that we say to comfort ourselves in those quiet, private moments when we’re at our lowest.
The album drops us directly into the fire with its opener “Back and Forth”. Here, Yokley’s friend and collaborator, José James takes lead vocal with a simple plea “We say we won’t, but we go back and forth again”. As Yokley’s drums erupt to the foreground, Japanese keyboard maestro BIGYUKI lays down a fiery synth lead. Amidst this maelstrom of sound, James escorts us into that painfully gray period of a breakup when the relationship is dead, but the love still lingers.
While Yokley’s collaborators like BIGYUKI, José James and Taali all add crucial elements to the project, the process of crafting Sometimes, Late At Night began in solitude. Inspired by hip-hop legends like J. Dilla, Yokley found himself holed up in his room, pouring himself into a batch of homemade beats that would later form the album’s foundation.
“So, obviously in March of 2020, everybody had a lot of free time.” Yokley recalls. “I was just in my bedroom, on my laptop making a lot of beats at the time. I was using Logic and a lot of my beats were sample-based. I would make beats with the samples and then take away the samples and try to come up with my own lyrics and melodies to these beats. Sometimes it would just be me on the keyboard picking a sound I like, or making a sound that I feel sounds cool. And then just playing around until I find a cool melody.”
Armed with a handful of beats, Yokley would later take these rough sketches into the studio and augment them with his explosive, polyrhythmic drumming. From there, BIGKYUKI was recruited to add his dynamic, improvisational synth playing to further bring the tracks to life. The result of this process are tracks like “Let Her Go”, “Megaman” and “Remedy” which straddle the seemingly insurmountable gulfs between hip-hop, jazz fusion and prog-rock. When asked about the eclectic nature of the album, Yokley reveals that it was not the result of any intentional attempt at genre-hopping. Instead, the music’s diversity arose naturally as the product of Yokley’s own tastes.
“I don't really consider genre, because I love so many different genres.” Yokley explains.
“And I’ve played with a bunch of different artists from jazz to hip hop, to folk music, and R&B. So, all that stuff is already ingrained in my mind when I'm creating things. The music I make pulls from all the genres that I listen to and love, automatically. It wasn't a conscious decision.”
A jazz-rooted, hip-hop-informed masterpiece, Sometimes, Late At Night obliterates the confines of genre, not by pastiche or haplessly slapping together influences. Instead, the music here exists as a unique sum of its parts. As deeply personal as it is experimental, Sometimes, Late At Night is an album of dazzling musical and emotional peaks and valleys. By ushering us through the raging waters of heartbreak, we eventually arrive with Yokley on the shores of healing and self-discovery.