Jakarta's Batavia Collective Turn Jazz Into Club Music on a New Live Session Video

Spiritual Jazz, Sinful Bass

Batavia Collective just announced a new live session video, and the title does the reviewing for you: Spiritual Jazz, Sinful Bass. It sums up what the Jakarta trio does.

In the room: Doni Joesran on keys, Elfa Zulham on drums, Kenny Gabriel on synth bass, reading off each other inside an open, warehouse-like space strung with neon. Three of the four tracks they play come from their EP CODED, which moves from ambient textures and fractured beats to club minimalism and ritualistic techno leanings.

The EP Behind It

CODED came out on the label Syndicate, run by Kiat and Cherry Chan, billed as "live jazz meets underground pulse" and built from Bruk rhythms and techno minimalism across four tracks. Two of those tracks carry outside vocalists: Indonesian alt-soul singer Kamga features on "Ring the Bells," and Singaporean experimental artist weish sings on "Signs". The instrumental for the weish track was recorded during the same Katamama Suite session at Potato Head that produced "Ring the Bells". Nobody overdubbed any of it. "We didn't use a click or metronome, so we couldn't overdub," Kenny said. "It just became the final version."

No Setlist Is Not a Slogan

Batavia Collective doesn't use setlists or backing tracks for their shows, which used to be a problem. "We used to argue on stage," Kenny said, "like, really yell at each other mid-show. Now we use in-ear monitors so we can cue each other quietly. It changed everything." Some songs started as accidents the band kept. Drummer Elfa says some of their best tracks began as unplanned 30-second jams that got built into full songs after the fact. The sound draws on The Comet Is Coming, Soil & "Pimp" Sessions, Slide Five, G-Force and Goldie's live band, a reference pool strange enough that it mostly explains why the group resists being filed under any one genre.

Scene Credit

The trio has played Wonderfruit, SXSW Sydney, Java Jazz Festival and Art Basel Hong Kong. Batavia Collective's earlier singles "Propulsion" and "Affirmation," plus a debut EP, came out on R&S Records, which the band says helped introduce their sound to a more global audience. Two more EPs are already lined up, one with a Japanese label, one with a Hong Kong label.

Batavia's own name comes from the colonial-era name for Jakarta, and even its track titles double as timestamps of the city, like "Senopati Shuffle," named for one of its nightlife strips. Off stage, the three of them share one obsession that has nothing to do with jazz. "My life is just music and basketball," Kenny said. "If I get tired of writing music, I watch NBA. Twice a week, we play."