TOEJAZZ FOR DEBBY

And a wee history of Toejazz

The honest story is as such: In January 2015, following a late night television performance of one of my entertainment management clients, I freebased cocaine in the men’s room of the Times Square Dave & Busters with a time traveling musician named Travis DeSecoli. Gregarious, boisterous — but with a real knack for playing it cool when a dude would body check the restroom door, entering to come take a piss. Travis would hit the hand dryers and hold the smoking aluminum under its blast. As we passed the hot foily back and forth, he told me many things about the dark future of this once great nation, all of which have shown to be true. He also knew about my coming divorce; about how I'd be fired from my music industry job by the end of the next week. When he learned about my involvement in the music industry, his jaw dropped open in a crazed delight. He began to tell me about a burgeoning underground scene of jazz musicians inspired in equal measure by Miles Davis's 1986 new jack cheese triumph Tutu and the soundtrack to ToeJam & Earl, a 1991 Sega Genesis video game based on the titular funky alien rappers who must rebuild their crashed spacecraft in hopes to return to their home planet, Funkotron. He claimed this heretofore unheralded scene was vast and would begin its true rise to notoriety in the year 2023. He called it "Toejazz." Travis pulled a rubberbanded stack of CDRs from the wasteband of his sweats — each with a foggy plastic case of his own music. I’m ashamed to say I lost the CDRs following the ugly divorce (predicted by Travis) shortly after that night. For seven years, I scoured the depths of every digital service provider hoping for the day Travis might upload his music. I never found anything from him, but I believe I have uncovered the percolating online community of jazz musicians of which Travis foretold. ULYSSA collected this music onto a 2022 cassette compilation called The Shape of Toejazz to Come. I suppose the idea was to manifest Travis’s predictions regarding the rise of Toejazz. In these slightly more sober years, perhaps exploring the vast plains of Toejazz has become a new addiction. You gotta serve somebody.

The release struck a chord, particularly with some record shops in Japan. Our friends at Tobira Records in Kasai have barely been able to keep the tape in stock, describing it to their customers as such: “The introductory compilation work of the new genre Toejazz, which is slowly gaining momentum under the surface, has been restocked for the first time in Japan. I'm addicted to the squishy jazz that seems to be playing at the supermarket. I'm surprised that there are so many artists.”

So many artists indeed. We’re sitting on hundreds of hours of Toejazz as I type these very words. And the genre is not without precedent. Aside from Tutu and ToeJam and Earl, one can trace elements of Toejazz across top-level cultural output — Jonathan Wolff’s 1989 Seinfeld theme song and 1996’s The Hey Arnold! theme; right on to Lil B’s 2022 experimental midi-jazz album Afrikantis and WOW, an album released just this year by genius Kate NV.

ULYSSA followed up The Shape of Toejazz to Come with another mixtape called Bitches Toe, a notable chonk of which showed off the more experimental side of the genre — Gary Michael Grave’s chaotic-good midi explorations; the industrial moving herds of Gerry Huggins’s slap-bass; the ADHD compositional feats of Allen Blackwell. It all felt like passing the acrobatics of a highway patrol sobriety test with flying colors — all while utterly hammered on that brown liquor.

Along the way, we discovered that Toejazz is both an emerging genre and a freewill video game simulation of the mind — each newly discovered Toejazz paragon, a new odd reality to explore for your twisted little avatar.

And so now, a digi-kazoo wind gusts across the pixelated green canopy of Toejazz Jungle. It curlz around your sinewy alien body and whips your stupid beanie propellor into a cartoonish whirr, sending you up and over Toejazz Falls into a new hidden level. It’s an infinite florid boudoir. A Black Lodge of sorts — an endless curtained labyrinth with dark mirrored floors. Brushing against the velvet curtains in the endless open world, your character develops chicken skin, THO and a bit of a chub. You’ve got its nervous system synched with yours via the glowing orb gaming console. The controller is unresponsive. Your avatar seems hypnotized. The soundtrack is the serpentine, Afro-Cuban fanfare of Bobby Richman’s “Yessy”. And you’re half expecting Helen Folasade Adu to begin cooing a torch song. But it’s too wily, too twitchy. Something’s amiss here. Something’s lascivious. "Mrs. Ulyssa, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?" By the time the words pass through your lips it’s already too late for you. You’re sinking into the black glass floor like a silk molasses quicksand — down down down into a slow, gelatin-filled underwater level, breast stroking through the translucent slime toward some Final Boss. This is DEBBY, a 21-teated Cthulhu toejazz goddess, who you just know ‘bout to devour your little butt into her magnificent jellyfish vagina dentata. "Perhaps this is… also a portal??" you think before the screen deepens into a full bleed reverberating lavender nothingness. Far from the final level, Toejazz for Debby is but another gummywormhole in the Toejazz Multiverse.

Toejazz For Debby is a considerably more erotic affair than its widely celebrated predecessors. “Proto Janus” by Steve Lucas is the film score for ‘House of Holes’ directed by Michael Mann. Lesu B.’s “St. Thomas Nights” is a haunting and sultry siren song. And Keith Kehrer’s “Crowded” is the song you hear bouncing through the hotel halls, leading you to some far-back ballroom where the last couples left on the dancefloor are craven, grinding walrus. Though let’s be honest — all our Toejazz offerings have been pretty dadgum erotic. But surely, once again, ULYSSA pushes at the boundaries of what this latent genre can, will, and might already be — unafraid to disrupt the bloom of a rare and delicate man-eating flower or the migratory patterns of a flock of griffins. Cross your fingers and yours toes for us!