DOMi & JD Beck

If you were to visit the website of DOMi & JD BECK—the astoundingly virtuosic Gen-Z jazz duo—you’d be told a dubious story about a 12-year-old saxophonist/physicist (DOMi Louna) and a 6-year-old sheep investigator/physicist (JD Beck). 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 collaborator have given us demands exploration. DOMi & JD BECK’s music finds both humor and greatness in harmonic complexity, rhythmic shiftiness, and speed. 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 acclaimed debut album—NOT TiGHT, released by Anderson .Paak’s new label APESHIT in partnership with the legendary jazz label Blue Note Records—is an attempt to bottle their goofy magic. They offer winking breaks and gleeful pivots, but the album is more composed than anything they’ve done before, toying with pop structures and pretty restraint. That befits their origin story. The duo first played together in a room full of blaring demos at a trade show, but they bonded over gauche keyboard FX and mom jokes. Over the next year and a half, they wrote and recorded much of NOT TiGHT at JD’s house in Dallas on drums and a 49-key MIDI board with just a few mics. The album—which earned them two GRAMMY nominations including Best New Artist—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. The duo has since performed an unforgettable NPR Tiny Desk Concert, made national TV appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live, and been featured in the line-ups of music festivals across the world from Coachella to the North Sea Jazz Festival. Along the way, DOMi & JD BECK have sat in with Hancock and backed Thundercat, Ariana Grande, Eric André, and more; they also co-wrote “Skate” on .Paak’s GRAMMY-winning album with Bruno Mars as Silk Sonic.