Jharis Yokley - Sometimes, Late At Night '2024

Tracks list

Sometimes, Late At Night is the stunning, genre-traversing debut from drumming
virtuoso, Jharis Yokley. Yokley-who has worked with everyone from Solange and
Chance the Rapper to Ani DiFranco and DJ Premier-calls upon his jazz-informed
chops and hip-hop sensibilities to craft this colorful and adventurous album.
Like many great works of art, Sometimes, Late At Night was initially inspired by
a breakup.

“So, the album’s mainly about this relationship,”Yokley
explains. “It's not like that I regret ending it, but I knew it had to
happen. But reminiscing back on those times, I was wondering if I made a
mistake.”

The inevitable fear and uncertainty that follows a breakup is palpable
throughout the album’s 10 tracks. The lyrics are minimal, often taking
the form of brief lines that are sung repeatedly like a self-soothing mantra.
Yokley’s words throughout the record are sparse but each song conveys its
own rich world of emotion. The lyrics on songs like “Friends”,
“Move On” and “Miss You”, feel like things that we say
to comfort ourselves in those quiet, private moments when we’re at our
lowest.

The album drops us directly into the fire with its opener “Back and
Forth”. Here, Yokley’s friend and collaborator, José James takes
lead vocal with a simple plea “We say we won’t, but we go back and
forth again”. As Yokley’s drums erupt to the foreground, Japanese
keyboard maestro BIGYUKI lays down a fiery synth lead. Amidst this maelstrom of
sound, James escorts us into that painfully gray period of a breakup when the
relationship is dead, but the love still lingers.

While Yokley’s collaborators like BIGYUKI, José James and Taali all
add crucial elements to the project, the process of crafting Sometimes, Late At
Night began in solitude. Inspired by hip-hop legends like J. Dilla, Yokley found
himself holed up in his room, pouring himself into a batch of homemade beats
that would later form the album’s foundation.

“So, obviously in March of 2020, everybody had a lot of free time.”
Yokley recalls. “I was just in my bedroom, on my laptop making a lot of
beats at the time. I was using Logic and a lot of my beats were sample-based. I
would make beats with the samples and then take away the samples and try to come
up with my own lyrics and melodies to these beats. Sometimes it would just be me
on the keyboard picking a sound I like, or making a sound that I feel sounds
cool. And then just playing around until I find a cool melody.”

Armed with a handful of beats, Yokley would later take these rough sketches into
the studio and augment them with his explosive, polyrhythmic drumming. From
there, BIGKYUKI was recruited to add his dynamic, improvisational synth playing
to further bring the tracks to life. The result of this process are tracks like
“Let Her Go”, “Megaman” and “Remedy” which
straddle the seemingly insurmountable gulfs between hip-hop, jazz fusion and
prog-rock. When asked about the eclectic nature of the album, Yokley reveals
that it was not the result of any intentional attempt at genre-hopping. Instead,
the music’s diversity arose naturally as the product of Yokley’s
own tastes.

“I don't really consider genre, because I love so many different
genres.” Yokley explains. “And I’ve played with a bunch of
different artists from jazz to hip hop, to folk music, and R&B. So, all that
stuff is already ingrained in my mind when I'm creating things. The music I make
pulls from all the genres that I listen to and love, automatically. It wasn't a
conscious decision.”

A jazz-rooted, hip-hop-informed masterpiece, Sometimes, Late At Night
obliterates the confines of genre, not by pastiche or haplessly slapping
together influences. Instead, the music here exists as a unique sum of its
parts. As deeply personal as it is experimental, Sometimes, Late At Night is an
album of dazzling musical and emotional peaks and valleys. By ushering us
through the raging waters of heartbreak, we eventually arrive with Yokley on the
shores of healing and self-discovery. 

Jharis Yokley - drums, vocals
BIGYUKI - synth, piano
José James - vocals
Talia Billig (Taali) - vocals

Tracklist:
1.01 - Jharis Yokley - Back and Forth (3:10) 
1.02 - Jharis Yokley - Friends (1:56) 
1.03 - Jharis Yokley - Miss You (2:39) 
1.04 - Jharis Yokley - Let Her Go (2:40) 
1.05 - Jharis Yokley - Remedy (3:14) 
1.06 - Jharis Yokley - Sleep (2:32) 
1.07 - Jharis Yokley - Move On (4:05) 
1.08 - Jharis Yokley - Megaman (2:58) 
1.09 - Jharis Yokley - Only See Her (2:52) 
1.10 - Jharis Yokley - Was It Really Love (3:52) 

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