General News / March 18, 2019

Dublin funk/jazz/R&B duo KnowHow share debut track

General News / March 18, 2019

Dublin funk/jazz/R&B duo KnowHow share debut track

KnowHow is a duo made up of producer and guitarist Cc Brez, who has worked with Republic of Loose among others, and vocalist Jesse John Heffernan, who recently went solo but cut his teeth as a member of hip hop collective The Animators.

 

“You’ll hear touches of Anderson.paak and The Internet, maybe,” Jesse tells us. “But it’s mostly just our own styles blended. Brez comes from a funk/pop background and mine’s an old school soul and hip hop thing, so it’s exciting to blend the two together.

“We both have our own solo projects so creatively we always have that stream to tap into. I see this as another way to express my ideas and how I see the world as it is right now. Its current and its in the present.”

Jesse has worked with one of Ireland’s most revered collectives, ChoiceCuts, which he tells us had a bearing on this new direction.

“In the first two years I worked with Hiatus Kyotie, Snarky Puppy, Thundercat, Flying Lotus, Booker T Jones, Lee Fields & The Expressions (who wrote some of the music from my last record), Candi Staton, Talib Kweli and loads more incredible artists. Some of them were only coming up at the time and we would get them once/twice a year. For instance the first time Snarky played they did two shows, both sold out, and I couldn’t explain the vibe in the room when they played. People moshing to jazz is just something else.

“So I was soaking all this up and got to put what I had experienced into this project. I was listening also to the N.A.S.A. album ‘The Spirit of Apollo’ a lot the year before Brez hit me up. It’s a collab melting pot and really set my mind into that mode. With The Animators we would get a beat from MathMan, the lads would write verses and I’d try wrap it up with a chorus that brought all their ideas together, which I loved. But this was something different. Getting a beat from Brez and having to write the whole thing lyrically was incredible. It really opened a different area of creativity for me. Especially since I’d been writing on an acoustic for so long and not hearing the finished song really until it had gone through a big recording process with a big band and brass and studio time.”

Check out their maiden voyage below.