July 27, 2022
Until recently, if you wanted to learn about DOMi & JD BECK—the internet’s most hyped jazz (etc.) duo—you had to visit their website, click on a rat playing saxophone, and read them in their own words, as a 12-year-old theoretical physicist (DOMi Louna) and a 6-year-old sheep investigator (JD Beck) who have been “gaining traction since summer of 2018 for their bodybuilding masterclasses.”
Let’s fix that. “My philosophy of life is don’t take shit too seriously,” says DOMi Louna, born Domitille Degalle. And that’s fair. But the vibrant world she and her right-hand collaborator have given us demands exploration. They reveal a bit more on their Instagram profiles, via clips of their jams, with JD on a simple drum kit and DOMi Louna on MIDI keys. She favors sounds that evoke ‘70s jazz fusion and the colorful blips of 2000s Pokémon soundtracks, while he tunes and plays his snare in ways that can sound electronic, channeling IDM and boom bap. Sometimes they’re stuffed into a bathroom and sometimes the drums are muffled by pretzels stacked on the hi-hat, or toilet paper tossed on the snare. Their long-awaited debut album—NOT TiGHT, released on Anderson .Paak’s new label APESHIT in partnership with Blue Note Records—is an attempt to bottle the goofy magic.
DOMi & JD BECK’s music finds both humor and greatness in harmonic complexity, rhythmic shiftiness, and speed. Their earlier viral Madvillainy tribute sets Madlib’s “Meat Grinder” at about 200 BPM. Naturally, their album abruptly adopts and ditches tempos, toys with time signatures, and sneaks extra beats into bridges. They perform as if racing, with winking breaks and pivots, but NOT TiGHT is also more composed, featuring a handful of pop structures and moments of pretty restraint. It features the likes of Thundercat, whose deadpan funk is their closest antecedent, Herbie Hancock, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Mac DeMarco, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and .Paak himself. They didn’t want the record to feel like jams. “People were telling us you gotta record a live album, do it like the old jazz greats,” JD says. “We don’t want a snapshot of what we do to be our art. We want something built. We wanted to do something new.”
The collaboration began under silly circumstances. DOMi Louna was a teen protegé at Berklee by way of the Paris Conservatory; JD, four years her junior, had gigged since grade school around his hometown, Dallas—first in producer Jah-Born’s band, where he duetted with MPC beatmakers and DJs spinning Dilla. In 2018, another Dallas drummer, Robert Searight, happened to invite both JD and DOMi Louna to join an ensemble at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) trade show in Anaheim, CA. They played in a room full of blaring instrumental demos, surrounded by a chaotic din. “It was so bad, we couldn’t hear anything,” JD laughs. They bonded over gauche keyboard effects and mom jokes, and a more audible jam that night sparked interest in working more.
JD invited DOMi Louna to Texas, where he was playing with the musicians in Erykah Badu’s band at the singer’s birthday party. “I recall it vividly,” DOMi Louna says. “As soon as we met, we wrote.” In a soundproofed windowless garage at JD’s family home in a Dallas suburb, with horses next door, they played for hours and came out of those first sessions with what would become NOT TiGHT’s title track and lead single “SMiLE.” JD sang the main melody, DOMi Louna harmonized chords, and they found a groove from there.
DOMi Louna eventually started scheduling all of her Berklee classes on the same day so she could spend the rest of her time in Dallas. They’ve been inseparable ever since, to the point that they finish each other’s sentences. Over the next year and a half, the pair wrote and recorded the bulk of the album at JD’s house on drums and a 49-key MIDI with just a few microphones. At least three song’s drum tracks were recorded on an iPhone. “The mixing engineer literally wanted to kill us,” DOMi Louna says with a grin.
They also started filming. JD thought of it as an act of archiving, storing ideas to revisit later, more than exhibition. It was a test to stay loose—like Elvin Jones, JD says—with the pressure of a camera rolling. “Some people are so used to a camera but it’s hard for me,” DOMi Louna says. “Every time I tense up.” But they shared the footage, and people loved their videos. Thundercat discovered them this way and so did Anderson .Paak. Says JD, humbly, “I guess the Instagram algorithm was in our favor.”
.Paak, who started hosting the duo when they visited Los Angeles, signed DOMi & JD BECK in late 2020. He gathered them around a whiteboard at his studio, asked for their dream collaborators, and over the next year landed each one. Their Herbie Hancock collab, “MOON” is based on a years-old chord progression that they fleshed out into a sweet love song with the jazz legend featured on both vocoder and piano. “PiLOT” is a rap posse cut—along with Snoop Dogg, .Paak surprised them with Busta Rhymes.
.Paak holds sway on “TAKE A CHANCE,” which features a tender hook sung by DOMi & JD BECK themselves. Their voices thread several songs on the album, another excuse to stretch their limits. “Even if you’re not a trombone player,” DOMi Louna explains, “if one note of trombone will sound good, you should play it.” Their singing often serves as soft texture to puncture dramatic changes. “U DON’T HAVE TO ROB ME” is a polite apology, to a would-be burglar, that they’re only carrying credit cards, which they can easily cancel.
Another standout is the skittering “TWO SHRiMPS” featuring Mac DeMarco. “We wrote the instrumental in 2018, then went to his house in 2020 for his vocals,” says DOMi Louna. “The song is totally not his usual style and in 9/4, so it was really fun to do it and blend our styles.”
Along the ride, DOMi & JD BECK have sat in with Hancock and backed Thundercat, Ariana Grande, Earl Sweatshirt, and Eric André; they also co-wrote “Skate” on .Paak’s GRAMMY-winning album with Bruno Mars as Silk Sonic. Neither can believe what’s happening, but leave it to them to skewer the moment. When JD suggests people might hate NOT TiGHT, DOMi Louna says, “That would be sick! Booo. They suck!”
