The Album I’m Still Hearing, 25 Years Later
I’ve been sitting with two albums this week — Guru’s Jazzmatazz Vol. 3: Streetsoul and SAULT’s Untitled (Black Is) — back to back, which turned out to be an accidental and completely illuminating double bill.
Both are collaborative statements. Both are rooted in Black music’s soul and R&B identity. Both feel larger than any single artist. But they are almost mirror images of each other in how they operate, and that contrast is what made me want to write about Streetsoul now — 25 years after it was given to me, in the year it came out.
Untitled (Black Is) is deliberate mystery: no photos, no credits, no interviews, just music as collective political weight. Streetsoul is the opposite — Guru as named host, every collaborator credited and celebrated, a project that wears its community on its sleeve. One album hides its people to make the music speak louder. The other shows you exactly who is in the room, and the room is astonishing.
What I remember from 2000 is how warm it felt. Not warm like smooth jazz, warm like a late-night session where everyone has stopped performing and started actually playing. The lyrics stuck immediately — they still do. The grooves were unhurried but never slack. And the names in the credits read like a gathering I wanted to be invited to.
I had no idea I was hearing people on the edge of changing everything.
This CD was a gift from João Costa — one of my closest friends, who put it in my hands that same year it came out. That’s the kind of friend João is: the one who knows what music you need before you do. I still owe him for this one.
The Third Volume — and What That Means
Streetsoul is the third of four Jazzmatazz albums: Vol. 1 (1993), Vol. 2: The New Reality (1995), Vol. 3: Streetsoul (2000), Vol. 4: The Hip Hop Jazz Messenger (2007).
The first volume is the one that matters most in music history. Released in 1993, it was genuinely radical: Guru brought live jazz musicians — Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, Branford Marsalis — into the studio to play alongside hip-hop production. Not samples. Not interpolations. Actual musicians, in conversation with actual rap. At a moment when jazz and hip-hop were still treating each other with polite suspicion, Vol. 1 said: there’s no boundary here.
Vol. 2 expanded into R&B territory, more polished, broader guest list. Still strong. Slightly less focused.
By Vol. 3, Guru had a decision to make. The jazz-hip-hop fusion concept was established — he’d proven it twice. The question was where to take it in 2000. His answer: follow the music that Black America was actually living in, which in 1999-2000 was neo-soul. Erykah Badu’s Baduizm (1997) and Mama’s Gun (2000). D’Angelo’s Voodoo (2000). The Soulquarians collective — which included Common, ?uestlove, J Dilla — were in the process of redefining what soul music could be.
Guru placed his album in that current.
Vol. 4 (2007) is the sad endpoint — Lil’ Kim, Snoop Dogg, the concept diluted, the magic gone. Guru died in 2010 after a heart attack in 2009. The series ends there, and Streetsoul retrospectively becomes its emotional peak: the moment before the decline, when everything was still possible.
What “Streetsoul” Actually Means
The subtitle isn’t decoration. This album is deliberately positioned between two worlds — street (hip-hop’s grit, urban realism, the groove that moves bodies) and soul (emotional depth, vocal tradition, the legacy of Marvin, Stevie, Aretha). Guru’s whole career lived in that hyphen. Gang Starr — his main project with DJ Premier — was the most jazz-literate rap duo of their generation, but they never went soft, never lost the edge.
Streetsoul is the Jazzmatazz series finding that same balance. It doesn’t sound like jazz fusion for people who are embarrassed by hip-hop. It doesn’t sound like hip-hop that uses jazz to seem elevated. It sounds like both things existing simultaneously and comfortably — which is much harder than it looks.
The production credits tell you everything: Gang Starr, The Neptunes, The Roots, J Dilla, Erykah Badu herself. Five very different production philosophies, all coherent under the same album because Guru’s curatorial instinct was impeccable.
Why Guru Could Assemble This Room
This is the question worth sitting with. How does a rapper convince Erykah Badu, The Roots, Herbie Hancock, Isaac Hayes, Macy Gray, Kelis, Craig David, Les Nubians, Bilal, Common, Angie Stone, Junior Reid, and Amel Larrieux to show up for the same project?
Part of it is the Jazzmatazz brand by this point — two successful albums had established it as a prestige space, not a vanity project. Artists wanted to be associated with it.
But the bigger part is Guru himself. His full name: Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal. Even as a title, it’s generous — the emphasis is on the gift being shared, on the rhyme being universal. Guru’s persona on mic was always calm, deliberate, never about ego. DJ Premier was the fireworks; Guru was the gravity. That quality made him the ideal host — someone artists trusted not to overshadow them, not to dominate, but to create the conditions for something collaborative to happen.
There’s also the community dimension. In 2000, the neo-soul world was tightly networked. Erykah Badu, Common, The Roots — they were all Okayplayer family, they knew each other, played on each other’s records, shared sensibilities. Guru was adjacent to that community through his jazz credentials and Gang Starr’s impeccable reputation. An invitation from Guru was an invitation into a frame that made sense to everyone he called.
Compare that to SAULT. Inflo built a similar community — Kiwanuka, Little Simz, Cleo Sol — but kept it hidden, anonymous, the faces invisible until Drumsheds in 2023. Guru did the opposite: he named everyone, celebrated everyone, made the community visible as the point. Two ways of saying: this is bigger than one person.
The Neptunes Tracks — Hearing the Future
Two tracks on Streetsoul were produced by The Neptunes — Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo:
“All I Said” featuring Macy Gray, and “Supa Luv” featuring Kelis.
In 2000, The Neptunes were not yet the production behemoths they became. They had produced Kelis’s debut Kaleidoscope in 1999 — entirely — which introduced both Kelis and their sound to the world. But the full takeover hadn’t happened yet. That came in 2001 with Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U,” then in 2002 with Justin Timberlake’s Justified, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” and Clipse’s Lord Willin’ — at which point a survey found The Neptunes were responsible for 43% of songs played on US radio. Forty-three percent.
On Streetsoul, you hear the blueprint. That crisp, minimal snap. The space in the production — not empty, just exactly as full as it needs to be, nothing decorative. Kelis over a Neptunes track in 2000 sounds like a transmission from slightly ahead of where music was.
And N.E.R.D. — Pharrell’s creative statement project — was being assembled in the studio at this exact moment. In Search Of… came out in 2001 (South Africa and Australia first), then 2002 worldwide. So Pharrell shows up on Streetsoul as a producer while simultaneously constructing his own artistic identity as a frontman. That tension — between the hired craftsman and the emerging auteur — is audible in the precision of those two tracks.
The Roots — Lift Your Fist
“Lift Your Fist” features The Roots — Black Thought on the mic, the band providing what they always provided: live musicianship so tight it sounds programmed, but so human it breathes.
The Roots in 2000 were fresh off Things Fall Apart (1999) — their commercial and critical breakthrough, Grammy winner for Best Rap Album, the album that finally translated their decade of legendary live performance into a record that the wider world could hear. “You Got Me” featuring Erykah Badu had put them on mainstream radio. They were at the exact peak of their first chapter.
Their trajectory after this: Phrenology (2002), The Tipping Point (2004), How I Got Over (2009, Grammy Album of the Year nomination) — and then the decision to become the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon house band in 2009, which transformed them into a different kind of institution entirely. A band that plays every night for a television audience, for decades. An unlikely but genuinely significant cultural role.
On Streetsoul, they’re still in their pure form: a band, in a room, making something alive.
The Full Guest Register — and What It Tells You
Run your eye down this list: Erykah Badu, Common, Bilal, Angie Stone, Macy Gray, Kelis, Herbie Hancock, Isaac Hayes, Les Nubians, Craig David, Amel Larrieux, Junior Reid, Black Thought.
Nearly every one of these artists was either at their peak or just before it. Bilal was extraordinary — his debut 1st Born Second came out in 2001, was shelved by the label, and never got the attention it deserved. On Streetsoul you can hear why everyone who knew him couldn’t stop talking about him. Kelis’s debut was a year old. Craig David had just released Born to Do It — the fastest-selling debut in UK history at that point. Macy Gray had just broken through with On How Life Is (1999).
Guru caught all of them at the moment of emergence or just after first impact. The album functions as a time capsule of a very specific window: neo-soul before it became a genre category that labels marketed, hip-hop before the Neptunes/Timbaland production aesthetic became the dominant sound, live musicianship before Pro Tools democratised (and homogenised) everything.
What’s remarkable is that it doesn’t feel like a roster flex. It feels like a session. Everyone sounds present, not like they showed up to deliver a credited feature and left.
The Sound — What I Still Hear
What strikes me most, coming back to Streetsoul in 2026, is how non-anxious it sounds.
So much music from this era — even music I love — has a quality of straining, of trying to locate itself, of performing its own coolness. Streetsoul doesn’t do that. It knows what it is. The tempo is mostly mid-range, unhurried. The bass sits deep. The vocals — whether Erykah Badu’s cosmic murmur or Angie Stone’s gospel-rooted grit or Bilal’s stratospheric runs — are given room to exist without the production fighting for attention.
The Jazzmatazz formula is still intact: live musicians and hip-hop production in genuine dialogue, not layered over each other but interwoven. When a saxophone appears, it feels like it belongs there, not like a guest. When the drum machine kicks in, it’s not erasing the acoustic space — it’s adding to it.
This is the thing that I think explains why lyrics stick. The production isn’t competing with the words. You can hear what’s being said. The music creates the room and then gets out of the way enough for language to land.
Streetsoul and Untitled (Black Is) — A Conversation Across 20 Years
Listening to them back to back, here’s what I kept noticing:
Both albums use collaboration as the medium, not just the method. They’re not albums with features. They’re albums that only exist because of the community around them.
Both are rooted in a specific political and cultural moment of Black music. SAULT’s is explicit — Juneteenth 2020, three weeks after George Floyd. Streetsoul’s is implicit but real: the year 2000, a moment of genuine optimism and creative electricity in Black American music before 9/11 changed everything, before the music industry’s collapse, before the digital transition stripped away the economic structures that made albums like this possible.
Both resist the idea of a singular star. Guru is present throughout but never dominates — the guest vocalists carry the emotional weight. Inflo’s identity is submerged entirely. Different strategies, same instinct: the collective is the point.
Where they differ is in temperature. Untitled (Black Is) runs hot and cold — menace, devotion, grief, celebration, all of it cycling through. Streetsoul is warmer throughout. The politics in Guru’s world are there, but they’re carried in the dignity of the music itself, not in explicit confrontation. Streetsoul says: look at what we can build together. Untitled (Black Is) says: look at what we have survived together.
Both statements feel true. Both are necessary.
The Street in 2000 — What You Were Wearing When You Heard This
The word “street” in Streetsoul meant something very specific in 2000, and it’s worth pausing on what the actual street looked like.
FUBU — “For Us, By Us” — had been founded in 1992 by Daymond John and three childhood friends from Hollis, Queens. By 1997-98 it was grossing $350 million in annual worldwide sales, having pulled off one of the most audacious brand coups in history: LL Cool J wearing a FUBU hat while filming a Gap commercial, slipping “For Us By Us” into his rap, broadcasting it to America on Gap’s budget. By 2000, FUBU was at peak cultural saturation — not yet fading, still the emblem of what Black entrepreneurship could do in fashion.
Sean John launched in 1998 (Puff Daddy’s line). Rocawear in 1999 (Jay-Z and Dame Dash). Phat Farm had been running since 1992 (Russell Simmons). Together these brands were doing something that felt genuinely significant: Black artists competing directly with Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger — and winning. Not through corporate backing, but through community authority. The clothes meant something because the people wearing them were the people who made the music.
The aesthetic in 2000: baggy everything. Oversized jerseys, wide-leg jeans, Timberland boots that had migrated from construction sites to rap videos to global streetwear, fitted caps, du-rags, Air Force 1s. Velour tracksuits were just beginning to appear — that would be peak 2001-2002. The silhouette was generous, unhurried, occupying space on purpose.
What strikes me now is how the fashion and the music were operating from the same instinct. FUBU said: we can build our own world, for ourselves, on our own terms. Jazzmatazz Vol. 3 said the same thing — Guru assembling Black artists across jazz, soul, neo-soul, and hip-hop under one roof, accountable to nobody’s formula. Both were acts of cultural self-determination in the same year.
Hip-Hop in 2000 vs. Now — Two Different Planets
In 2000, hip-hop was album-centred and scene-based. You belonged to a world — Okayplayer (The Roots, Erykah Badu, Common), Roc-A-Fella (Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel, Kanye West as beatmaker), Rawkus (Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Hi-Tek), Soulquarians (D’Angelo, ?uestlove, J Dilla, Common). These weren’t just rosters — they were aesthetic communities with shared values about what rap should do, how it should sound, what it owed its listeners.
Lyricism was the primary currency. East Coast/West Coast beef had burned itself out with the deaths of Tupac (1996) and Biggie (1997), leaving a kind of open space where craft could reassert itself. The underground and the mainstream were still in conversation — Mos Def could chart; Common could get radio play; The Roots could win Grammys.
You bought CDs. You went to record shops. Music videos on MTV and BET were still the discovery mechanism. An album was an event.
Now: the album still exists, but the primary unit is the single, and the primary medium is the playlist algorithm. A song succeeds or fails in the first 30 seconds — the length Spotify counts as a “stream.” Scenes still exist but they’re global and fragmented simultaneously: UK drill, Afrobeats, Latin trap, hyperpop, bedroom pop — no single dominant community, no equivalent of Okayplayer as a shared house.
Trap’s rhythmic vocabulary — hi-hat rolls, 808 bass, sparse space — became as dominant in the 2010s as the Neptunes’ snap was in the early 2000s. Mumble rap came and went. Kendrick Lamar spent a decade proving that lyricism still had an audience, then won a Pulitzer Prize for DAMN. to prove it definitively.
What 2000 had that now doesn’t: friction. A scene you had to seek out, music that required a CD shop visit, communities that formed around shared physical spaces. That friction created depth. Streetsoul is a product of a world where music required commitment to find — which is part of why it still rewards committed listening.
The Year 2000 Was Extraordinary — and Streetsoul Knew Its Neighbours
Here’s what else came out in 2000, and why it matters for understanding Streetsoul’s place in it:
The Soulquarians were everywhere at once:
- D’Angelo — Voodoo (January 2000): The year’s first great statement. Deeply intimate funk-soul, recorded over years with ?uestlove and J Dilla. It sounded like nothing else and everything at once.
- Common — Like Water for Chocolate (April 2000): Common is a guest on Streetsoul AND released his own career-defining album that same year. He was operating at full creative power across multiple projects simultaneously.
- Erykah Badu — Mama’s Gun (November 2000): Same story. Erykah appears on Streetsoul AND delivered her second album — more expansive, more political, more herself — before the year ended. The neo-soul scene was running hot.
Hip-hop landmarks:
- Ghostface Killah — Supreme Clientele (February 2000): Dense, surrealist, maximally Wu-Tang. The critics’ choice for rap album of the year.
- Eminem — The Marshall Mathers LP (May 2000): The most commercially explosive rap album of the year, and one of the best-selling of all time. Controversy as fuel.
- OutKast — Stankonia (October 2000): The southern avant-garde at its peak. “Ms. Jackson,” “B.O.B.,” “So Fresh, So Clean” — three completely different songs, all landmark. OutKast that year were simply operating on a different plane.
Beyond hip-hop:
- Radiohead — Kid A (October 2000): The most debated album of the year, possibly of the decade. Radiohead abandoned rock for electronic abstraction and somehow made it feel like the only honest response to the millennium.
- PJ Harvey — Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (October 2000): Mercury Prize winner. Raw, urgent, New York-obsessed — her most accessible album and one of her best.
- Godspeed You! Black Emperor — Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven: Post-rock orchestral doom. An album that felt like the end of something and the beginning of something else simultaneously.
What I find remarkable: Streetsoul fits comfortably into this company. It’s not a peripheral release from that year — it’s central to one of the richest creative moments in recent music history. And it shared its collaborators with the rest of the year’s best work. D’Angelo, Common, Erykah Badu were all making landmark records in 2000 while also showing up on Streetsoul. The scene was that generative.
Why It Still Sounds Fresh
I think the answer is simple: it was never chasing a moment. The Jazzmatazz series was already counter-cultural when it started in 1993 — live jazz musicians in a hip-hop studio was against the grain. By 2000, the neo-soul move was not trend-chasing but genuine affinity. Guru was doing what he’d always done: finding the music he believed in and creating a frame for it.
Albums that chase trends date. Albums that follow a genuine creative conviction don’t — or at least, they age differently. You can hear the 2000 in the production, but you can also hear something that transcends it.
Twenty-five years later, I still remember the lyrics. That’s the test.
Standout Tracks:
- “Lift Your Fist” (The Roots — Black Thought — the album’s live heartbeat)
- “Supa Luv” feat. Kelis (The Neptunes in blueprint form — everything they became, compressed into one track)
- “Certified” feat. Bilal (proof of how extraordinary Bilal was before his debut got buried)
- “All I Said” feat. Macy Gray (The Neptunes again — that restraint, that space)
Notes: Vol. 3 of 4 in the Jazzmatazz series. Production by Gang Starr, The Neptunes, The Roots, J Dilla, Erykah Badu. Pharrell Williams was simultaneously constructing N.E.R.D. in the studio — In Search Of… came out the following year. The Roots had just won a Grammy for Things Fall Apart. Guru died in April 2010.
Written March 2026