Watch: Kassa Overall

Dressed in a bright papaya-colored two-piece, Kassa Overall sits behind a drum kit and takes the mic at NPR’s iconic Tiny Desk.

“Are you ready to ball?” he asks the crowd during the 2023 concert.

With his band behind him, Overall launches into his track “Ready to Ball” while assuming his duties as both rapper and drummer. The song’s melodic mix of jazzy piano, bass lines and bongos contrasts with the gruff attitude of Overall’s lyrics about jealousy, fame and material things.

I’m not trippin off a lil shit. Gettin’ big things poppin, not a lil zit, he raps, looking directly into the camera. I need my contract with a couple zips and a full fifth, just tell the truth at the pulpit.

A drummer, producer and emcee, Overall makes music with the avant-garde experimentation of jazz and the lyrical dexterity of hip-hop. You’re just as likely to hear Detroit rapper Danny Brown on one of his tracks as you are jazz trumpeter Theo Croker. You’re also just as likely to see him headlining as you are to see him backing up other artists.

Across Overall’s three albums, he’s crafted a sound uniquely his own while remaining accessible to the average listener. That prodigious sound has won him critical acclaim and a growing list of major accolades. In May he received a prestigious Doris Duke Performing Artist Award: $525,000 in unrestricted funds to further his craft in whatever way he sees fit.

“I’m a little obsessed with making something that people will be into many years in the future,” he says of his guiding principle. “I look at people from the past, and sometimes the greatest artists will not get their shine at the time. If you think too much about the shine at the time you might not make the dopest thing you can make. So I’m just kind of like, let me zoom out — is this dope? Would my grandkids like this?”

In four decades as a working musician, he’s racked up an impressive resume of work, performances and collaborations. In addition to performing on NPR’s Tiny Desk series, he had a stint in Jon Batiste’s house band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and worked with rapper Lil B, activist Angela Davis, musician Nick Hakim and guitarist/producer/composer Arto Lindsay, among many others.

Overall also played in the late jazz piano legend Geri Allen’s band Timeline and in drummer Terri Lynne Carrington’s group Social Science, and toured (with his older brother Carlos Overall on sax) as a drummer with Digable Planets (featuring fellow Seattleite Ishmael Butler). In the spring of 2025 at Jazz Alley, Overall played drums for touring NEA Jazz Master Gary Bartz, deftly drumming alongside one of the genre’s greatest musicians.

Born in 1982 in Seattle and raised in Mount Baker, Overall decamped to Brooklyn after college and spent many years there before returning to his hometown in 2020. He’s been Seattle-based since, working on various new projects and giving back to the community that helped raise him.

Overall’s musical roots stretch back to early childhood. His parents Charles and Melissa (who met on a yoga ashram in Seattle in the 1970s) provided Overall and his brother with tons of instruments to experiment with in their living room. From an upright piano to woodwinds, both boys tooted and banged on whatever they could. But even as a toddler, Overall felt called to the drums.

“My brother, being four years older than me, that’s that age gap where you really want to do what he’s doing. He was playing the drums and so when he would get off, I would get on,” Overall says. “I took to it. I was literally 2 years old. The drums were something that I could process quickly.”

When Kassa was in fifth grade, he and Carlos started to busk around the city. With his brother on sax and himself on drums, they’d play jazz standards from The Real Book at farmers markets, fairs, Folklife, the corner of 12th and Jackson in the heart of the Central District. Often, their dad was on the scene giving them pointers.

“My dad was pretty passionate about us,” Overall remembers, noting that his dad was a hobbyist musician. “I would play the gig, and then afterwards, you know, he might be like, ‘Man, you guys sounded really good, but you’re still slouching. You got to sit up straight and, I don’t think you’re breathing on the fast tempos!’ That kind of stuff. He was really coaching us.”

As he learned the drums, Overall developed a love and passion for hip-hop. His dad brought home records from artists like DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince and even gangsta rap like DJ Quik. “I was exposed to a ton of different music,” he says. “My dad was trying to get us to understand that art didn’t always have to be righteous. Art was art.”

Though jazz and hip-hop were different schools of music — both with deep history and traditions in Seattle — Overall saw that rhythm was a throughline between them.

At both Washington Middle School and Garfield High School, Overall continued to study jazz drums, learning from Seattle’s best jazz drummers like Garfield jazz band director Clarence Acox, Jr. and the late educator Larry Jones while also getting into beat-making and rapping. When he graduated from Garfield in 2001, Overall attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and, after completing that program, moved to New York in 2006.

For the next nearly 15 years, Overall dug into New York’s music scene, drumming in Geri Allen’s band, spitting rhymes with rap trio Das Racist and racking up recording credits with the likes of legends, including saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and singer Yoko Ono.

Terri Lyne Carrington met Overall nearly two decades ago when he was drumming with Allen’s band in New York, where she appreciated his organic style and fidelity to Allen’s sound. But it was upon their second meeting at a rooftop gig in Europe — Overall was playing with Theo Croker — that Carrington really saw what he could do.

“He started rapping,” Carrington remembers. “I was like, what?” Shortly after, she started to assemble her band Social Science and, remembering Overall’s dexterity, enlisted him into the ensemble. (The band’s album Waiting Game would go on to be nominated for a Grammy in 2021.) Carrington and Overall have since collaborated on numerous projects, including a 2025 tribute to singer Roberta Flack. During that time, she’s seen Overall blossom into the full-fledged musician he is today.

“An original sound started to emerge pretty quickly, and I think he really tapped in on how to do a hybrid between jazz and hip-hop,” she says. “He’s really nailing the quintessential way to blend the two.”

Others have likewise placed Overall in the pantheon of hip-hop artists who have mastered blending jazz into the rap world. “It’s very rare that the jazz guys get the hip-hop thing right, and Kassa Overall has done it,” said Gilles Peterson — a vaunted British DJ and music tastemaker — on his BBC Radio 6 Music show. “The Roots did it back in the day, A Tribe Called Quest did it, DOOM, Madlib, Dilla, Kassa.” (Watch Overall thrill Peterson and the crowd at the 2022 Worldwide Festival in Sete, France.)

It wasn’t until 2019 that Overall self-released his first record, Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz. After sitting on the material for months, he was compelled to finally release it after the passing of trumpeter Roy Hargrove, who plays on the record. The album clearly states Overall’s sensibility as both a drummer and emcee, expertly fusing experimental jazz rhythms with rap. On tracks like “Prison and Pharmaceuticals,” Overall raps about the predatory nature of prisons and Big Pharma (Uncle Sam pimping right down to the cuticles/What’s the best stocks? Prison and pharmaceuticals) over drums and a glittering piano.

Barely a year and a half later, in 2020, he dropped another full-length record, I THINK I’M GOOD. Pulling from his experience being hospitalized in college following a series of manic episodes, the album dives deeper into topics like mental health, prison and racism. Overall raps on a 4/4 rhythm that defines hip-hop, but often he’ll spit over freakier, more jazz-inspired time signatures, like on “Landline.” Here, he drums frenetically (with his brother on tenor sax), reminiscing about his childhood and the idea of being normal as a phone rings distantly in the background.

I was a joyous child if I ever was a child, he raps, gravely. Memories feel like dreams deferred/And time looks like a circle.

To make I THINK I’M GOOD, Overall became what he calls a “backpack jazz producer” (a play on the term “backpack rapper”). Instead of having a recording studio where his various collaborators came to him, he went to them, bringing all the equipment necessary in his backpack. Though the original term comes from hip-hop, there’s a jazz sensibility to it, reflecting the improvisation and dynamism of recording in various contexts.

“A lot of those things I did in the past, I did out of necessity,” says Overall. “I might have needed to do the backpack producer thing because that’s just what I needed to do to get those different instruments. But I’m also constantly shifting surroundings, having different conversations.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Overall’s expectations shifted. He’d been queued up to go on tour and take the world by storm, but suddenly everything shut down. He decided to head back to Seattle for a bit, and ended up settling down here more permanently.

Though the hustle and talent pool of New York City is attractive for most musicians, now he’s settled back in his hometown with his wife and young son, working from a studio behind his house on Queen Anne. Seattle’s slower pace allows him a lot more space to think.

“The other day, I went for a walk carrying my son, because he’ll fall asleep. I’m walking — I’m actually doing stairs — and I got inspired. I put a rap instrumental from the ’90s on, and I wrote a ton of bars, just walking around,” Overall says. “Then I went to the studio and laid them down.”

His third record, ANIMALS — his first with UK-based label Warp Records — came out in 2023 and flexes Overall’s skills. “The Lava Is Calm” opens with his distorted voice floating over a bossa nova-sounding guitar and serene trumpets, interrupted by a gunshot and rock guitar. On “Clock Ticking,” rappers Danny Brown and Wiki’s idiosyncratic rhymes flow while Overall drums and discordant, plunky piano notes play in the background.

Another frequent collaborator is Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets and Shabazz Palaces — who also graduated from Garfield. Butler is featured on ANIMALS’ “Going Up” alongside rapper Lil B and producer Francis and the Lights. When Overall toured with Digable Planets, it was a sort of full-circle moment; one of the first CDs Overall ever bought was a Digable Planets album.

Butler knows what it’s like to navigate the music industry as a Seattle native — and he, too, sees greatness in Overall.

“You have to have skill, flair and style and you gotta be able to mix all together in order to gain some type of notoriety and respect,” Butler reflects. “Those are the baseline characteristics that are expected from the lineage of growing up in this place – being an athlete or musician or rapper. It’s the Seattle way. [Overall] embodies it, embraces it, and is taking it off into his own concept.”