Sun worship
There’s a moment every spring when temperatures first hit t-shirt levels. Light returns and lures you outside to soak in it. Ben Jacobs, the vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and producer known as Crackazat, finds great inspiration in that feeling. He’s lived in Uppsala, Sweden, for 15 years, so he understands what winter costs you and what the sun, when it finally arrives, gives back.
“Going outside and having your first sunbathe can really assist with relaxing or meditating,” he says. “Especially compared to it being two degrees on a winter’s day and you’re on your iPhone in bed. You can’t really put it into words.”
But he doesn’t need to. He’s made an album instead, and Sun is exactly what the title promises – radiant, restorative, bathed in warmth. “Sun is the simplest word to describe the destination that this album is for me,” he says. “Sonically and musically what it is, and also a little bit of a reference to spiritualization or worship of something that gives us all life.”
It is also, by his own admission, the album he always wanted to make. To understand why it took this long to arrive, you have to go back to the beginning.
Jacobs grew up in Bristol, the son of a tap dancer. His mother moved to jazz, which meant that before he ever sat down to listen to it consciously, he’d already experienced it as something physical and communal. “I kind of stood on it without knowing it,” he says, leaning in close to his Zoom camera to articulate one of many thoughtful answers. “I grew up tap dancing to jazz music and experiencing it as a period art form.” For him, jazz has never been something academic that you sit down and study. It’s music you move to.
In Bristol, as a student, surrounded by a whole ecosystem of electronic music and bedroom producers, he was drawn into club culture. But something was missing. His relationship with dance was never purely hedonistic, never just a body experience. The four-four kick was there, the basslines were there, but the jazz sensibility, the harmonic richness and the swing all felt absent. Musicality was what he was after – the thing that separated a record that moved you emotionally from one that simply moved your feet.
Jazz, he says, was the original commercial movement, and only later went underground. Swing was the pop music of its era, with “huge dance bands playing essentially what DJs do now.” Years after that, “musicians wanted to be taken seriously as artists” and started playing more complex sounds in smaller clubs, which gave rise to bebop, or “musicians’ music” as it became known. “And you couldn’t dance to that,” says Jacobs. “And people don’t really sample that music either.” The marriage of jazz and the dancefloor had been broken.
It was only later, digging deeper into deep house, that Crackazat discovered the connection had never fully dissolved. Artists like Kerri Chandler had already built their sound on exactly that junction. “I kind of found this solution that had actually always been there,” he says. The realisation brought him into what he calls “the soulful underground,” and he dropped plenty of early 12″s on the likes of Local Talk and Futureboogie, before the first of many albums dropped in 2015.
Jacibs says his last long player, 2022’s Evergreen, pushed jazz and funk as far as they could go within the four-four framework. But the kick drum was always present, an anchor and in some ways a concession. “I couldn’t imagine any bigger step than halfway,” he admits, reflecting on his evolution from making club records to a live album. “I had to keep the four-four kick in there to keep me grounded, in a sense.”
Sun removes that safety net entirely. This is not a house album. It is live music, groove, acid jazz, funk – a direct reconnection with how Jacobs started, playing in bands, working with singers, moving between genres as naturally as breathing. The album was built almost entirely remotely, which presented its own particular challenges. Jacobs found himself in the unfamiliar position of being a director rather than a sole author. He wrote detailed briefs, formal musical notation and lyrics while managing logistics across time zones, waiting for files to arrive and hoping they’d land the way he’d heard them in his head.
“It’s a bit like directing a movie,” he says. “You pick the cast. They’re meant to breathe life into it.” The longest message thread, he says, was with Tamuz Dolev, the drummer, whose WhatsApp exchange with Jacobs ran to an extraordinary length as they worked out exactly how live drums should feel within what is otherwise a tightly constructed sonic world. “I wrote all of the patterns before,” says Jacobs, who has previously programmed drums himself inside the box. “He would replay them, and then he’d have the free leash to do his own fills after we felt like we nailed the groove.”
There was, by his own admission, the “occasional friction” – the natural result of a self-titled album with a very specific vision being filtered through a dozen different collaborators working remotely, including vocal performances from Eva Lazarus, Lyric Jones, Cap1talA and Olivier St. Louis, and live horns he recorded in Stockholm with Andreas Gidlund and Karl Olandersson. “But that’s where really clear communication comes in,” he says, adding that almost everything turned out as good or better than he’d imagined.
Living in Sweden for 15 years has left its mark, though Crackazat – an alias drawn from the school nickname “crackers” given by a teacher playing on his surname’s link to the Jacobs cracker brand – is characteristically measured about how much. The seasons are extreme, the winters long, the relationship with light and warmth something you can’t take for granted.
“It’s made me very resilient and sort of self-assured,” he says. That self-sustainability has seeped into the music: Sun following Evergreen maps his own personal narrative: weathering the cold, then finally, simply, existing in the warmth. “Evergreen was through winter, ‘I shall weather the winter and remain.’ Now we’re at Sun. I’m not resisting anymore. I’m just existing.”
Away from the studio, Jacobs is a dedicated father, as he has been since his first release, and fills his remaining hours with gardening, drawing, retro video game collecting and skateboarding, which he took back up during lockdown as a way of rinsing his brain of “forward planning and future angst.”
What comes next, he says, feels freer than anything before. The jazz and the club music can now exist as separate but connected entities. “I’m sort of finally being able to have these different branches to what I do, which is a much nicer way of existing. So perhaps there’ll be a separation for me now where I have longer extended albums where I explore live music, and I reconnect with that. And there’ll always be a band attached to that. I might even start my own label to focus solely on club music and stay connected to that.” Live shows also follow the album, including a gig with home label Freerange at London’s Jazz Cafe on October 17.
He may have been waiting a while, but now the Sun is out, Crackazat is blossoming all over again.
Kristan Caryl
