Mocean Worker

The arrival of Mocean Worker substantially expanded the scene of jazzy drum'n'bass. This recording name belonged to the wide-ranging producer Adam Dorn, whose father Joel had served as a key staff producer at Atlantic Records throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Joel oversaw sessions for Coltrane and Mingus as well as pop projects that included Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly," Bette Midler's first album, and the Allman Brothers' Idlewild South. Adam himself played bass and sang, trained at Berklee College of Music, and collaborated across the industry with figures such as David Sanborn, Hal Willner, and Chaka Khan. Together the two Dorns issued archival reissues on their own 32 Records imprint, whose holdings later supplied samples including Mahalia Jackson and Slim & Slam's Slam Stewart.

The Mocean Worker endeavor originated almost incidentally from a run of casually undertaken studio dates. Once the results proved strong, Dorn issued his debut album Home Movies from the Brain Forest in 1998 on the punk imprint Conscience. He next signed with the Island subsidiary Palm Pictures for 1999's Mixed Emotional Features, a set that retained traces of drum'n'bass while signaling the jazz-centered direction of later work. A year afterward came Aural & Hearty, blending disco-funk, house, and swanky club jazz. Dorn subsequently founded the Mowo! label, which released Enter the Mowo! in 2004 and the fifth Mocean Worker album, Cinco de Mowo!, in 2007. During 2008 he appeared on the compilations Jazz & Milk Breaks and Sundown: Music for Unwinding, then formed an eight-piece soul/funk ensemble for festival performances at Bumbershoot and the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival. Candygram for Mowo!, issued in 2011, broadened the stylistic range and featured appearances by trumpeter Steven Bernstein and rapper Lyrics Born. The 2014 compilation It's Pronounced Motion... followed. In 2015 Dorn contributed to the track "I Can't Breathe" on Marcus Miller's Afrodeezia, which also included verses from Chuck D.