“This shit from Oakland with love”
Big Boi played a tiny secret show in SF last weekend, but that wasn’t the Bay’s best hip hop show of the new year. That honor goes to Kahj & Versâam, who played a passionate, celebratory show in the Joe Henderson Lab as part of SMARTBOMB’s full venue takeover of SFJAZZ. The Oakland duo ran through tracks from the EP Kahj Loves You, featuring Kahj spitting self-reflections with a voice like polished stone: You know they mean it because they say writing saved their life. The verses arrive over Versâam’s crisp, jazz-inflected boom bap, making for a classic pairing of fierce poetic delivery and smoothed out beats.
As Kahj pointed out at the show, one of the EP highlights is “Good Grief,” featuring a verse from Versâam plus enchanting vocals from Samplelov on the hook. The other feature is also a delight, bringing in Oddity (another local jazz-meets-rap creator whose release Oddisea, Pt. 4 was one of our favorite albums of 2024).
