Description

Tracklist:

Jackson Conti– Steppin’ Into Tomorrow (Prelude)
Generation Match– Electronic Dimensions
Jahari Massamba Unit– Pretty Eyes
The Kenny Cook Octet– High Jazz
Yesterdays New Quintet– Medley: Don’t You Worry Bout A Thing (Live At Spear For Moondog)
Madlib– Interlude
The Big Black Foot Band– Reality Or Dream
Russell Jenkins Jazz Express– Drunk Again
Poyser*, Riggins* & Jackson*– Funky Butt, Part 1
Jahari Massamba Unit– Wonderin’/Nightime
R.M.C.– Space & Time
Yesterdays New Quintet–Conquistador
The Big Black Foot Band– Tarzan’s Theme
Madlib–Interlude
Joe McDuphrey Experience– Kimo

The seventh installment in his Madlib Medicine Show, a jazz album with his Yesterdays New Quintet called High Jazz. Madlib’s been busy this year. And while his recorded output always spans the gamut, he often returns to recurrent themes, spread across the genres that serve as home base or bases, as it were. Jazz is one such base. With High Jazz, Madlib begins anew offering familiar jazz sounds from a series of “new” groups from his ever-augmenting cosmos. Call it “Yesterdays Galaxy.” High Jazz, the name itself a tribute to the landmark jazz-fusion album released by Stanton Davis’s Ghetto Mysticism in 1976, shows a marked development in Madlib’s craft. Every element of jazz is there. Is that tune modal-funk? Was that song psych-fusion? Was that a bossa-tinged run or another kind of latin-affair? Where did that sitar come from? Madlib’s Yesterdays-excursions are never easy to categorize and that’s the point while experiencing chops like these, the desire to rigidly define takes a back seat to aural pleasure.