An archive door opens up, in a lone basement in New York City. One lone producer, armed with a sampler, enters a room filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of dusty old tapes. On it, is the steady musical progress of one of America’s most recognizable sounds: jazz. The producer has a clear, yet delicate task ahead of him; to scour through the countless hours of music, load them into his sampler, and use his creativity to come up with something new. Using archived master files and stems of existing tracks undoubtedly is a sampling artist’s wet dream, but for the mind of a visionary it is the golden opportunity to blend two musical styles that have always been destined to be one.
There have been many moments in the history of hip-hop where artists explored the interface with the genre of jazz. Whether through the samples of A Tribe Called Quest, Miles Davis’ collaboration with Easy Mo Bee on Doo-Bop, or Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly. But in 2003, a 30-year-old producer by the name of Madlib, was invited by the legendary jazz label Blue Note to dive deep into their archives and make a reinterpretation of what he was able to dig up. The result is an almost hour-long remix album on which Madlib not only shows his skills as a sampling artist but also produced a bridge between jazz and hip-hop that has not been seen before but would be repeated afterward.
As mentioned before, artists have always tried to find ways to combine certain genres, in this case, hip-hop and jazz. On the 1991 track Excursions, Q-Tip cleverly points out that bebop- an energetic substyle of jazz- and hip-hop are basically the same things. The difference lies in its implementation and the awareness of both worlds to one another. Before Madlib’s Shades of Blue, the main way of making a hip-hop track feel jazzy was to dig up old forgotten records and then sample bits of them to create a beat. Anything else, like having a full band as The Roots, was almost unthinkable or just weird. Even the aforementioned Miles Davis album Doo-Bop was produced with sampled beats for Davis to play trumpet over, with some pieces of his work simply being unreleased performances now being used for the album.
So what makes Shades of Blue different? It is not in the sampling techniques or Madlib’s usage of old interviews to describe Blue Note as a label, it is that he actively searched for acceptance by the jazz community by making them part of this hip-hop album. Throughout the album, Madlib made the productional choice to let some of the artists from which he is remixing work, call him up and say something. One can see this is a simple introduction to the next track being played, but I think it is of vital importance to successfully combine both genres with each other.
“Hi, this is Melvin Sparks checking out the beat conductor, Madlib, on the Blue Note record, keeping the funk alive!” This is one of many introductions to be heard on this record, and it is a simple way of letting the audience know that hip-hop and jazz have definitively fused as one. So, if you’re a producer looking to find a way to combine your favorite styles, try not to think of it as ‘How can I make it sound like this?’, but rather try to find a way to make both styles accept each other by making them part of the record.
In the end, this remix album could be seen as a way for Blue Note to make some money off of the phenomenon that is hip-hop, but I like to see it as their way of saying:
“ Madlib, this hip-hop thing you’re doing, that’s cool. Come on and in. ”
The archive door closes behind Madlib. He places his sampler on a lone table in the middle of the room, as he starts to go through all the tapes surrounding him. Adderley, Blakey, Coltrane, Davis. How to fit the greatest of all time, over 16 tracks, with 57 minutes worth of wax? Maybe one day in the future, another producer will get the chance to go over the outtakes of Madlib’s creations, create a new vision and continue the art of cross-pollination.
Written by
Ayrton X