The LA hip-hop and jazz luminary Terrace Martin has a new album called Drones out today, and he told us all about it in a freewheeling interview with our jazz columnist Phil Freeman touching on Martin’s close personal and professional relationships with the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Herbie Hancock, Snoop Dogg, and Kamasi Washington. It’s a must-read, and Drones is a must-hear.

The new album’s title track brings together the all-star team of Kendrick, Snoop, Ty Dolla $ign, and James Fauntleroy. In the interview, Martin told us about working on the song with Kendrick years ago and how the rapper ended up providing the name and concept for the whole LP. Here’s that part of the interview:

I’ll tell you when we started first, ’cause it really is important for the definition. It started off — man, I’ve been working on this shit for so long. My last record came out in 2016, I think, Velvet Portraits. I’m slow now, working on records. But shortly after I finished To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick was looking for a studio to work in in LA, and he found one. Him and [Derek] Ali found a little private studio in Santa Monica and I was doing all kinds of music at the crib at that time, too. I was listening to a lot of Club Nouveau and this group called Loose Ends at the time, back to back to back, and I came across little ideas that I felt could probably be something.

So I called Kendrick and was like, “Yo, where you at, man?” And he said, “I’m at this spot in Santa Monica,” so I came by the studio and we just caught up. I think at that time I hadn’t seen him in a few weeks ’cause he’s busy, I’m busy, and we were having a whole conversation about a lot of things — personal things, musical things, fun things, laughing, talking, all the shit we used to do, and at the end we realized we had this whole conversation and we were looking at our phones and not each other the whole time. We were just looking on Instagram but having a conversation, but no eye contact, and at the end of that, he asked me, “Do you have an idea?” I said yeah, and he told Ali to bring up the idea so we could hear it on speakers, and he went straight in the booth and was like, “Man, I’ma call this shit ‘Drones,’ I’m gonna talk about we are just the phone and everything controls us.”

We’re like fuckin’ robots, man. And it’s not just us. Everybody always says the younger generation is so on the phone, but naw, everybody is addicted to the phone. Everybody. So he went in there, man, and he just started saying what being a drone means to him, and… the song “Drones” itself is pretty much a statement that we are all one and we are all even robots as one. It’s like we are all in a weird state to where we have these things, these gadgets [that] control us, and they help us but a lot of times they make us more shallow. We lose trust, we have lack of compassion, we have lack of love, it’s shaming going on, it’s all these different wars between these different people that everybody thinks everybody’s different, and the phone is a big deal.

Man, think about this. We all can witness murders on the fuckin’ phone now. Like, we are all traumatized. I was thinking the other day, I saw one of my good friends die on the phone. Nipsey Hussle, one of my dear friends since he was a kid — I saw my friend die on the phone. We’re traumatized. We’re all fucked up. So Drones is a body of work that discusses these issues, how we have a lack of compassion, how we have a lack of trust, how we are people [for whom] nowadays perception is the new reality, which is a whole fucked up thing as well, you know what I’m saying? So the whole body of work is attacking all of these themes, not negatively, attacking them masked as love songs.

Here is “Drones” the song:

And here’s the whole Drones album, which also features Cordae, Arin Rae, Smino, Channel Tres, Celeste, Hit-Boy, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, YG, Mayala, Leon Bridges, D Smoke, and Kim Burrell:

Drones is out now on Sounds Of Crenshaw/BMG.