Steve Ellison, also known as Flying Lotus, is important for being a nexus in LA for a vibrant young American jazz community. Many of them students of Horace Tapscott, the crew around Ellison is a heavy cohort and they make You’re Dead! a lunatic overflow of skill. Thundercat co-writes and plays bass on almost every track, and you get lots of saxophonist Kamasi Washington and drummer Deantoni Parks. Herbie Hancock plays electric piano on several tracks, along with Brandon Coleman, and Kendrick Lamar and Snoop each pop up for a song. It’s LA, and it’s a fairly insane record, sort of an instrumental partner to Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly, which came out exactly a year later and features many of the same players. The mood here is excess—jazz at its most layered and bonkers. It would be an insult to the players who have been playing and recording within the pre-existing jazz network to say this cohort ‘revitalized’ jazz or some such, but there is a sort of electric green halo to this music, a sheer buzz from the energy flowing through it. Thundercat is part of the Jaco lineage as passed down through Squarepusher, and the prominent string arrangements are a nod to Ellison’s great aunt, Alice Coltrane (who Ellison is likely tired of hearing about). The more you listen, the more you hear. Genuinely rich and wild music, which originated with a guy who did it all with samples for years. And there is a light framework of computer music running under it all.