Think about the last time a dance track made you stop scrolling and actually listen to the room around the beat. Modern electronic production often leans on sterile, quantized perfection, yet your ears naturally crave the human imperfection of real hands hitting keys, strings, and reeds. When you hear live instrumentation breathing inside a classic four-on-the-floor groove, something shifts immediately. That exact magnetic pull is what drives Chocolate, the standout focus track from the debut collaborative album Esqalator Musiq by Atlanta trio Dallas Dawson, Marquinn Mason, and Josiah Soren.
Stepping into this release feels like walking into a late-night warehouse session where the lines between jazz improvisation and Deep House dissolve completely. Drawing direct inspiration from pioneers like Larry Heard and Kaidi Tatham, QUAS and Josiah Soren built Esqalator Musiq around the raw warmth of old-school Chicago House. Instead of relying on pre-packaged software loops, the trio recorded the entire project using live instruments, weaving together a classic TR808 drum machine, acoustic piano, saxophone, P Bass, and Rhodes electric piano.
You can hear that chemistry in every bar of Chocolate. Rather than treating live instruments as decorative samples over a static beat, the trio treats the groove itself as an open conversation. This approach comes naturally to QUAS, the Atlanta duo formed by saxophonist Marquinn Mason and drummer Dallas Dawson. Having spent years hosting jam sessions and sharing stages in projects like Konda and Greenscreen, Dawson and Mason approach dance music through an improvisational lens. Their individual and collective resumes stretch across collaborations with heavyweights including Russell Gunn, Byron the Aquarius, Kamaal Williams, and Little Tybee, giving them an intuitive command of rhythm and space.
Adding Josiah Soren to that equation anchors the low end and expands the sonic architecture. A bass player, tour manager, producer, and published author from Atlanta, Soren has worked across rock and roll, jazz, funk, and hip hop records nationwide, even publishing an educational book with Mel Bay Publishing. Prior to this collaboration, he organized over a year of writing and studio sessions at Atlanta's Grammy Award-winning Maze Studios for his January 2024 release Samurai, a record uniting a five-piece contemporary jazz band from the Atlanta school of Reverence—including Marquinn Mason—with eight voices from the city's hip hop scene.
Notice how that background shapes the texture of Chocolate. There is a shared discipline here—a culture of musical respect and freedom—that allows jazz harmony and experimental electronica to sit effortlessly inside a club-ready House framework. As more listeners gravitate back toward tactile, analog-driven dance records, releases like this prove that hardware drum machines and live jazz musicians belong in the exact same room.
For independent artists crafting uncompromising, genre-blurring records like this, getting the music onto global streaming platforms without losing creative control is essential. If you are producing your own tracks and want a straightforward way to release unlimited music while keeping 100 percent of your royalties, check out DistroKid (affiliate link) to streamline your distribution.
When you put on Chocolate, pay close attention to how the live Rhodes and P Bass lock into that TR808 pulse—it is the kind of timeless groove you keep coming back to. What stands out most to you when live jazz instruments meet old-school house rhythms? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
