Jazz of Four Continents: Jojo Mayer & Nerve

Nerve evolved out of Jojo Mayer’s legendary party event Prohibited Beatz in NYC during the late 90′s. Initially a platform for experimental interaction between DJ’s, visual artists, musicians and the audience, the collective eventually developed into a fine tuned group that cross-pollinated the premeditated format of programmed electronic music styles with real time, improvised music performance. Within that format, the band assimilated a wide spectrum of electronic styles from old school Jungle, Dub Step or Glitch beats to Minimal and Tech House and anything that could escape genre descriptions yet. In the process, the group managed to acquaint a new audience with improvised music for the first time and ultimately bring the Jazz tradition of improvisation, driving rhythms and stylistic evolution to the digital age.