hyssop

Speaking of Nas, follow me on this one: a group called Gong gets sampled by Nas for a track called “Oochie Wally.” A DJ named Rupture takes the Oochie Wally instrumental off the single and mixes it with Missy Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On” and into Ricky Dog aka Bling Dog’s “Risen to the Top” to kick off his Gold Teeth Thief mix (mixed live on 3 turntables and available as a free download in two parts – google it, it’s awesome). Now who loves you?

Gong – Babooji

Nas – Oochie Wally (Instrumental)

DJ Rupture – Get Ur Gong Risen

Today’s five star award for best use of jazz piano sample goes to DJ Premier for the song “N.Y. State of Mind” off Nas’ Illmatic.

Joe Chambers – Mind Rain.mp3

Nas – N.Y. State Of Mind.mp3

Let’ open the drawer of musical curios and see what we might have in there … [rummaging noises] … ah yes! Here’s a song by a group called Flanger, who sound like a jazz group but whose songs are in fact entirely programmed. I was pretty stunned by the precision of this particular recreation. It reminds me of looking at a cloned sheep, or Rachel from Bladerunner: your brain knows something is askew but has a hard time locating what it is.

Flanger – So What.mp3

Doubling down on my doubling up of DJ Shadow, more sample madness:

Kay Gardner – Touching Souls.mp3

Tangerine Dream – Invisible Limits.mp3

DJ Shadow – Changeling.mp3

I figured I’d double up on the DJ Shadow. Why? Because Endtroducing was the first album made entirely from samples. That’s right – every sound on the album is a sample. If wikipedia is right, he only used an AKAI MPC60, two turntables, and a borrowed Pro Tools setup to make the whole record. And it’s great! By the way, “sekoilu seestyy” apparently translates from Finnish as “confusion calms.” And “The Human Abstract” translates as some sort of whacked out orchestral-fusion solo piano vehicle.

David Axelrod – The Human Abstract.mp3

Pekka Pohjola – Sekoilu Seestyy.mp3

DJ Shadow – Midnight In A Perfect World.mp3

This is one of those mother-of-all-upright-bass loops. Just killer. The sampled riffs don’t come until about 2:20 into Queen of the Nile, but you won’t miss them. I have a mental image of Eric B and Rakim just looking at each other and giggling once they had this bass chopped up… it’s that good.

Young-Holt Unlimited – Queen of the Nile.mp3

Eric B. and Rakim – Don’t Sweat the Technique.mp3

Ok, I’m pissed at all of you. How is it that nobody told me about this Isaac Hayes song before now? This thing is GREAT. I thought I had the wrong song when I started listening to it because the opening piano riff is not the sample Public Enemy uses in “Black Steel In The First World,” but I was enjoying the song anyway and kept listening, and then during the piano solo at the 7:20 mark there it was! Beautiful! And you’ve got to love some classic PE – those guys were amazing.

Isaac Hayes – Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymi.mp3

Public Enemy – Black Steel In The First World.mp3

I’ve got more John Coltrane CDs on my shelf than any other artist. In fact I should probably make a pilgrimage to Saint John Coltrane Church in San Fransisco at some point. But the other reason to post this one is because I knew the original before I heard it get sampled (actually I think Koop hired a bass player to play the same riff, so it’s not a sample in the same sense as the other posts). With most of the other posts I’m discovering these soul and r&b classics for the first time, but this was an old favorite jazz tune reincarnated as a different song. I remember that I was at a martini bar in Portland, Maine, and just about jumped out of my chair when I heard the immediately recognizable bass riff diverge into a chill jazzy electronica number. The waitress was able to do some sleuthing and that’s how I heard about Koop, and this tune with it’s Greensleeves underpinnings.

Koop – Waltz For Koop.mp3

John Coltrane – Greensleeves.mp3

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is the the way music companies want to protect themselves from piracy. Turns out it’s also the way they can screw you out of your own legitimately purchased music. From Microsoft:

“As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers… If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play.”

Read more here.

If I had bought music from their service to use in DJ sets I’d be even more pissed about this. I reinstall my operating system about once a year, and after August 1 I would no longer have access to my own music purchased through MSN if I did that.

Lastly, iTunes works in the same way. All those m4p’s people buy? The “p” is for protected. What if Apple pulled this move and shut down their servers? Ladies and gentlemen, this is why I refuse to buy music “protected” by DRM.

Back when I was a freshman in college I used to listen to a rap show (the rap show, hehe) on the college station, WTJU. I loved this show because there were approximately zero rap shows to listen to in Maine while I was in high school, so this became a major source of discovering new music. And I very clearly remember hearing this Brand Nubian track one day and thinking “I should pick up that album.” It just kind of instantly grabs you like that. So I was really, really happy to finally find the original source of the loop used in “Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down,” and it turns out it’s by the great jazz man Lou Donaldson.

Lou Donaldson – It’s Your Thing.mp3

Brand Nubian – Punks Jump Up To Get Beat Down.mp3

What took me so long to start this project? I should have done this years ago… it’s been fascinating to discover all these great old R&B and jazz tracks, and this stuff should get played more often. It’s like some fragment of musical heritage that’s out there in popular culture , but not many people take the time to go back and listen to the source of all the inspired sampling that started going on in the late 80’s and continues today. It’s just a blast to hear these old tunes, and suddenly a familiar and immediately recognizable riff jumps out at you then dissolves as the song goes in a completely different direction than the one (re)popularized in a hip hop track.