The New Weird Virtuosos Making Jazz for the Post-Internet Age

Where Pomplamoose’s videos had a certain cuddly earnestness, Cole’s were off-the-wall in the manner of an Adult Swim show: nauseatingly abrupt digital zooms, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them visual gags. His most popular video to date is a 2017 clip of his band KNOWER playing their tune “Overtime” in a nondescript hallway, with onscreen text narrating the song’s various changes, as if the viewer requires a visual prompt to understand that a drum fill or sax solo is happening. 

His most distinctive contribution to the new weird virtuosity may be Clown Core, an ostensibly anonymous duo that is widely understood to consist of Cole and the saxophonist Sam Gendel. They play a furiously technical and laugh-out-loud blend of jazz, electronic music, and extreme metal, in clown masks, sometimes from the inside of a moving minivan, and others from the inside of a port-a-potty. (“My official statement, on the record,” Cole says when I ask him about Clown Core, “is that I’ve never heard of Clown Core.”) The comedy isn’t only in the presentation, but the playing itself: In the song “1,” Gendel emits a single timid bleat before Cole’s frantic drumming utterly engulfs his sax, like the whelp of a cartoon character confronted with a terrifying monster. 

Cole followed a distinctly new trajectory as a musician, one that would be unrecognizable to the 1960s and ’70s jazz players he looks to as inspirations. Still, a half decade has passed since he first started racking up YouTube views in the millions. He is of two minds about the idea that the aesthetic he helped to pioneer is reaching a new peak in its cultural impact. He can tell that certain younger musicians see him as an important influence. And plenty of people are coming to his concerts these days. 

But he’s noticed a dip in viewer engagement with his YouTube videos, and he doesn’t feel like he’s really cracked the newer platforms. He’s gotten genuine artistic fulfillment out of posting to Instagram, challenging himself to compose micro-scale pieces of music that meet the platform’s one-minute cap on video length. Not so much on TikTok. “I’ll do little drum videos, or something that I know for sure is going to do well on these internet platforms for shredded attention spans, and I try to keep it still fulfilling for me,” he says. “I just use it as another outlet, because it’s another place where eyeballs are.” 

There is a subtle generational divide between Cole and the musicians who have arrived in his wake, like Spilly Cave, who sees TikTok as a worthy outlet for creative expression in and of itself. Cole puts a lot of care into his YouTube videos, and looks at some of them as artworks on par with the music that soundtracks them. Others are more like promotional tools, for getting people to come to a show, or buy an album, or just listen to a song. He seems mildly deflated by social media’s centrality in the current-day music business. “I guess I have experienced a different time, when it was the older model of doing it, which is releasing an album and then trying to tour,” he says. “Now, it seems like every musician is labeled a ‘content creator.’”