This music video captures the spirit of jazz drumming with musical glyphs and a nod to synesthesia

A Visual Exploration Into Jazz is a collaboration between DV Studio: designer and director Jay Vaz and motion designer Lawrie Miller – who met in university and have created together for the last ten years – and the filmmaking duo Twin, also known as the Inglis Twins. Featuring UK jazz drummer Mackwood, the short film lives up to the title – the creative team wanted to explore the melodic terrains of rumbling, frenetic jazz drums by assigning certain shapes to different sounds, exploring how we visually interpret the sounds of the bass, the snare, the cymbals through the arrangement of graphic elements. The result is something that is playful, lively and filled with a love for the lawlessness of jazz music.

Evoking a synesthesia-esque visual style, with music turning into colours and shapes, the creative team used a wide angle shot “as a canvas” to paint bleeping graphics all around Mackwood as he plays. At first, the team explored ways to automate the animations, but eventually the majority of animations were laboriously manual. When it was done by hand, it added a tactile relationship to the music, a hair of a second out of place in one direction or another – which is very jazz-like, after all; human, improvisational, reactive. “Approaching the visuals with the same flexibility of making custom, instinctive decisions. When the animation becomes too rigid, the synchrony between the audio and visuals can feel forced rather than natural for the viewer,” says Lawrie.

Inspired by the usual suspects: jazz legends such as Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, Dorothy Ashby and Pharoah Sanders, the short film was driven by alternative music, rhythms that bounced in and out of the standard 4/4, almost impossible to visualise, especially the “outer-planetary” sounds of Sun Ra.

The film was conceptualised when Jay and Lawrie worked on a visual identity for Blue Note Re:imagined, a compilation series from iconic Blue Note Records where contemporary artists reinterpret the legendary Blue Note catalogue. The project featured artists such as Jorja Smith, Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia and Shabaka covering iconic tracks from the likes of Donald Byrd, Bobbi Humphrey, Thelonious Monk and Wayne Shorter. When the duo brought the design to life with bespoke animations that were synchronised note by note, they had a ton of fun, so they sought to continue it in deeper detail.

The project is the first episode in which Jay and Lawrie hope will become a wider series – with Mackwood as the first guest. “We came across Mackwood a few years back from a mutual friend and were all mesmerised by his aura on stage. After experiencing that energy live, we felt there was something special worth capturing and archiving,” says Jay. “One thing we’ve always been fascinated by is how performers can completely lose themselves on stage. In jazz especially, musicians are able to improvise and create something spontaneous that briefly pulls you out of everyday life and into a shared moment of pure presence.”

The film’s graphics look almost retrofuturistic, analogue lights popping up on the dashboard of a spaceship – stars, wiggles, lines, dots, brief moments of gritty texture. This could be overdone, cluttering the screen and muddying the visuals of the soft, grainy film-like aesthetic, but instead it opts for scatterings of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments. It’s a million little bits of not just how musical notations look but more so how they feel.