Pan Amsterdam is a musical enigma wrapped in an enduring riddle. His creator is a jazz musician from Houston who’s found fame working with Detroit punk rock God, Iggy Pop, and British indie royalty, Metronomy, and now makes shapeshifting, adventurous hip hop out of the music’s spiritual home, New York. He’s an irreverent character born out of frustration and named after a misunderstanding, yet one who’s on the verge of releasing his fourth album of truth-slaying, genre-crossing rhymes and beats. So, who is Pan Amsterdam? Everything you want him to be. And more besides.
“I think like an improvisor,” the man behind Pan Amsterdam, the effervescent Leron Thomas, explains in a howl of laughter. “That’s how my albums pretty much move. It’s improvisation. Even now just me talking on tangents.”
Thomas is right; Pan Amsterdam has evolved out of myriad states of invention. Some practical, some thrust upon him and others just insanely creative detours undertaken because that’s the true role of an innovator.
“Improvisation is a deep part of my musical core so no matter if it’s improvisation in the traditional form or not, it will show its head in how organic the album moves – it’ll sound probably like one big improv. And it moves in between calculated ideas to sheer experimental venturing. That’s how life has been for me and that’s also how I listen to music. I don’t think anyone sits around and listens to one genre anymore.”
The album to which Pan Amsterdam refers is Confines, a free-flowing experimental hip hop-cum-electronic fusillade that picks apart our HyperNormalised, scroll down contemporary culture, while also sounding like a super-energetic, funk-laden riot. No wonder Thomas refers to the dichotomy of his personas thus: “Leron Thomas is like the George Clinton or Mothership and Pan Amsterdam is like the Bootsy Collins.”
Across 12 infectious tracks, the sports-wearing Pan Am raps eloquently about racial politics and identity one minute (on the singles Day Out and White Ninja); the next he’s namechecking pop cultural icons Billy Idol, Chuck Norris, Janet Jackson and Little Richard for some light-hearted fun. His finely-honed and acutely-noted social observations give him the stature of a hip hop George Orwell, while his obsession with food (ham hock, calamari, pork chops, chicken and gravy, mashed potato, onion rings and erm, Lucky Charms and KitKats are all mouth-wateringly mentioned) sees him positioned as the natural heir to Anthony Bourdain.
It’s an entertaining stream of consciousness that takes in some biographical moments (the title track for instance), but at its heart and soul is Pan Amsterdam trying to strip everything back to a childlike sense of purity and innocence and then “exploding out of that into what is currently happening to you and looking at it from a peculiar… almost like an alien; you’re totally removed, and this is your first experiences on the planet. You know what I mean?”
And if all that sounds like some cross-cultural, haphazard assemblage, you’d be half-right. Pan Amsterdam is a self-confessed “genre-hopper”. His musical background consists of playing gospel in church as a child (his first live performances), jazz and hip hop, but also The Grateful Dead, Nirvana and Tejano music, as he grew up in Houston’s suburbs after leaving the vicissitudes of the inner city.
But there’s also a method to his seemingly random musical madness. His gastronomical musings point to an easily, ahem, digestible representation of cultural fusion. The world has changed for the better because of the variety of foodstuffs we now consume, he’s saying, let’s not go back to the past and a bland diet of mono nutrition and what that means for a wider blinkered mindset.
“The blacks have a very special relationship with the Chinese in the neighbourhood,” he says. “I like going to different hoods and the Chinese place knows how to fix smothered pork chops or something like that. There’s some soul food on their menu. I remember when I was in Louisiana, they had a fusion where it was like Thai gumbo and it would taste amazing. It’s just the culture clash of it all. And I think the food references are to kind of draw this universal look on things.”
Confines – the title is a not-so-subtle nod to the album “going different places” and Pan Am not being hemmed in – not only tastes good, but it also sounds great too. The music brings to mind the golden age of hip hop’s boom bap era, plus the out-there sounds of backpack hip hop in the late-90s and early-00s. There are allusions to Kool Keith in there (“Kool Keith is sick, If you really study Kool Keith and the way his mind works. It’s the sickest stuff on the world in the world”), Busta Rhymes, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Tribe and Houston’s very own Geto Boys. There are also nods to Anti Pop Consortium, MF Doom and Prefuse 73. The inimitable presence of Jay Dee is infused in the inventive beats as are the wider Soulquarians collective that Thomas played with back in the day – most notably performing alongside Bilal Oliver.
Poignantly, the album is dedicated to his father who passed during its genesis. Back in 2005, a little confused as to his place in the jazz scene, Thomas released the first of his Dirty Draws albums, collections that were raw and self-produced. The music he was collating for Confines evoked similar feelings: “raw, honest musical expression, free of belonging to any one specific genre”.
“I remembered when I first gave my father the first Dirty Draws album,” he continues. “He was like: ‘Well, you got that out of your system.’ Cause this was supposed to be a jazz purist and I was singing, rapping and I wasn’t even a good rapper. I was just trying stuff… just being honest about the time I lived in.”
Thomas’ rebirth as Pan Amsterdam is an example of him being honest. Disillusioned by jazz music’s gatekeepers (“club owners, promoters… the energy wasn’t on a good frequency”), he followed the music and subsequently began singing. This saw him gain rave notices by the likes of Gilles Peterson and led to work with French producer Guts. Producers started sending him hip hop beats and Pan Amsterdam eventually came kicking and screaming into the world.
“I cracked a joke with Pan Amsterdam,” he recalls, talking about the first Pan Am release, Plus One, and subsequent album, The Pocket Watch, both coming out in 2018. “And it was fun. It was liberating. It was the feeling that I got when I first started singing and before that when I first started playing the trumpet. It was that same kind of feeling, that inspiration and enthusiasm. I noticed how things align quicker – and better – when you’re kind of on your path.”
As for the name, that came about because Thomas’s friend Malik Crumpler had a rap group with thatmanmonkz (the first beat maker for Pan Am) called Madison Washington. Thomas assumed it was an allusion to the Big Apple’s prestigious thoroughfare and Washington Square Park, so he plumped for Pan Amsterdam (after Amsterdam Avenue.
“I found out later Madison Washington was a runaway slave who hijacked a ship and sailed it to the free states,” he says. The coincidence is apt; the idea of Pan Amsterdam breaking free from the boundaries of Leron Thomas’ musical past is fitting.
Those early Pan Amsterdam releases caught the ear of Iggy Pop, who remains a champion, regularly spinning Pan Am tracks on his 6 Music show. In 2019, the pair collaborated on Pop’s acclaimed Free album, with Thomas going on to tour the record and act as the music legend’s musical director. Iggy’s singular drawl adorns PLUSONE on Confines.
“Iggy Pop brought a musical joke I was kicking around to life,” Thomas smiles. “Without Iggy I don’t know how Pan Am would’ve made it. He brought Pan Am to the front. I just didn’t know how ready Pan Amsterdam was.”
After three albums on Def Pressé, Confines is Pan Amsterdam’s first release on the proudly eclectic Heavenly Recordings. And for that, we have to thank Irish rap sensations Kneecap. Impressed by the trio’s forthright opinions, Thomas and his Irish wife wondered which label would be brave enough to sign them. With a touch of serendipity, Thomas contacted Heavenly just as his collaboration with Metronomy, the single Nice Town, was being hammered by Radio 6 Music.
“It’s been amazing, because they operate like one really cool fan, one super fan,” he says of his dealings with the magical Heavenly.
But then all of Pan Amsterdam and his creator Leron Thomas’ creative endeavours have been touched by music’s rare capacity to connect kindred spirits. Over the years, he’s rubbed shoulders with an early incarnation of Destiny’s Child (as a child he won a talent competition in Houston alongside Beyonce and co, and even attended the same Performing Arts school), played with jazz great such as Robert Glasper, Charles Tolliver and Roy Hargrove, and performed with hip hop/neo-soul luminaries such as Kanye West, Lauryn Hill, Bilal, Erykah Badu and Mos Def.
“That’s the beauty of music and humanity,” Pan Amsterdam concludes. “Like-minds connect. You can connect with somebody across the world with just divine alchemy and in this case, that’s what happened. Iggy didn’t know that I was a songwriter and things of that nature. He thought I was just a rapper.”
It’s amazing what you can achieve with a little improvisation.
– Words: Jim Butler –
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