There they were, this prodigious Gen Z fusion duo, gleefully vandalising jazz’s sacred cows – Coltrane, mainly, but also Madlib and MF DOOM – between jamming with Thundercat, collaborating with Herbie, co-writing with Silk Sonic, signing to Anderson .Paak’s Apeshit label and, along the way, releasing a Grammy-nominated 2022 debut album, “Not Tight”, so breathlessly good it blew your hair back. 

Hype for DOMi & JD Beck reached fever pitch. Barely out of college (Berklee College of Music), French-born keyboardist Domitille Degalle played with a lightning-fast gusto befitting their video game-inspired beats and sicker-than-sick improvisations. Dallas, Texas-raised drummer JD Beck – three years younger, on the kit since he was five, his chops honed by YouTube binges of Art Blakey, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams. 

Audacious, often puerile, keenly aware of their brilliance, the duo shitposted on social media, told outlandish porkies (Domi is ‘the only living theoretical physicist’, and Beck a ‘6-year-old sheep investigator’) and largely stuck to email interviews, usually answering as one. 

“Most music isn’t about music anymore. It’s a tool for money and selling bullshit,” they said. “Hopefully we can help change that. It’s also fun reading all the social media debates arguing into which genre or style we should be categorised.”

In a circuitous way it makes sense. With expectations sky-high for a sophomore album promising bigger guests, bigger stages and bigger everything, sooner rather than later, the internet’s favourite jazz gremlins simply went to ground. The posts stopped. The queries went unanswered. 

Who was asking? Well, we all were.

As it turns out, DOMi & JD Beck were busy. Busy, they deadpan, getting a good eight hours’ sleep a night. Busy devoting hours to gaming, dog walking, parkouring through virtual labyrinths and getting high on THC-infused fizzy drinks. Busy making something no one could have predicted yet everyone – them included – wanted to hear. 

What might be the world’s healthiest unhinged lifestyle has somehow resulted in WHO ASKED?, a record that is their most ambitious – and indeed, their most intimate.

The first thing you notice as you roll out the album’s 15 tracks – aside from their aversion to a capital letter I, Is that somebody seems to have slipped an entire orchestra into DOMi & JD BECK’s toolbox. Opener ‘EPHiPHANiE’ is a symphonic wig out that pings between orchestral cinematics, cartoon whimsy and game console melodies, a taster of an aesthetic born from writing arrangements for legendary Dutch orchestra, Metropole Orkest. 

With Sibelius – the notation software – now their new best friend, this time around the compositions came first. 

Concert hall panache collides with basement jam session energy on ‘CONCERTiNO FOR PiANO, DRUMS AND ORCHESTRA’. DOMi wields the keys with the confidence of a crazed genius. Beck responds with rhythms whose ease belies their complexity. Around them swirls a collective whose parts were recorded separately. It all breathes as though each stood side by side.

The second thing that strikes you is that DOMi & JD BECK are singing. It’s an oddly vulnerable development for two musicians who’ve spent years saying everything instrumentally. But the vocals aren’t competing with the virtuosity. They’re another texture, another colour, even another instrument. Lyrics – some written for a screenplay that never happened – feel weighted with ambiguous meaning: ‘Obstacles we welcome in/Unknown feelings comforted,’ they sing on ‘RAiN’, which drifts and drizzles in technicolour; ‘One by one, the parts turn to one,’ come their voices on ‘PUZZLE PiECES’, an ideas-infused track larger than the sum of said parts. 

Real life creeps in on the likes of ‘GETTiNG OLDER’, the gratitude-laden ‘PHANTOM THREAD’ and ‘SMALL EYES’, a melancholic yet Dilla-esque ode to four-legged friends. Dirty grooves saturate ‘LOVELY MASQUERADE’, designed to loosen the neckties of any buttoned-up purist. The jokes, then, are as irreverent as ever – but are neatly folded into the craftsmanship. There’s much beauty, too, especially towards the album’s conclusion: ‘CLiMBiNG HiGH’ plaits their voices into an enchanting, ever ascending Jacob’s Ladder. ‘EPiLOGUE’, string-drenched and sparkling, sets out to soothe, before – with inevitable but always startling unpredictability – leaving things deliciously unresolved. 

Think you’ve got us figured out?, they seem to say. You haven’t. Not yet. 

Keep asking.

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Jane Cornwell is an Australian-born, London-based writer on arts, travel and music for publications and platforms in the UK and Australia, including Songlines and Jazzwise. She’s the former jazz critic of the London Evening Standard.

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