Listen to Jamael Dean’s Low End Theory jazz on “Akamara (Remix)”

Pianist and producer Jamael Dean is only 21, but his fingers are older. They’ve already backed Kamasi Washington on tour. They’ve performed alongside Thundercat. They’ve backed Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Carlos Niño. And they’ve danced up and down the keyboard on his excellent and rangey debut album for Stones Throw, Black Space Tapes, which mixes spiritual jazz with ambient and hip-hop production into a classic L.A.-beat scene stew. "Akamara (Remix)" reworks the album’s opening track into a jerking, inward loop that could hypnotize J Dilla. Someone call Earl Sweatshirt to see if he can spit over this.

Of the influence that L.A.’s music scene had on his own tunes, Dean says, it’s “the only place I can go in the same day to a jam session with music from the 20s and 30s to another session with music in the 40s through the 80s, and after that play music with my friends from that era onwards."