Madlib, and what he pulled out of the Blue Note vault

The way it started is less solemn than it sounds. The person who called Blue Note was Peanut Butter Wolf, who runs Stones Throw, and he was half joking.

Blue Note liked “Angles Without Edges”, the 2001 record Madlib had put out as Yesterday’s New Quintet, playing every instrument on it himself. Wolf suggested they let him do something. They said yes.

What turned up afterwards was not records. It was tape.

What he chose was not only the tunes

Blue Note sent him the masters of the old sessions rather than the released versions. Which means the separate tracks, and everything that surrounds a take.

Madlib describes it this way, in an interview quoted by Everything Jazz: hearing the things you never hear, the alternate takes, the minutes between takes when the studio is just people talking.

Like 30 seconds before the song, they’ll be talking in the studio, telling somebody to do this, or cussing at some dude or something. It’s just like how we do.

This is where the selection stops being a list of favourite tracks. He is choosing inside a catalogue that almost nobody has heard from that side.

The flute record everybody has sampled

Bobbi Humphrey’s “Fancy Dancer” is from 1975, her sixth for Blue Note. The Mizell brothers are producing, Chuck Rainey is on bass and Harvey Mason on drums, and Dorothy Ashby’s harp turns up on one track.

It is not a forgotten record: it is one of the most sampled in the catalogue. Madlib takes “Please Set Me At Ease” from it and builds a track over it with the rapper M.E.D.

Listen while you read

The most recognisable piece of all

Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father”, 1964, is the closest thing Blue Note has to an anthem. Taking it is the least clever move available, and he took it.

Silver on that record was moving away from hard bop, with an ear on Brazil and Cape Verde. Plenty of people know the bassline without knowing they know it.

Madlib redoes it with his Sound Direction group and what comes out is slow and slack, the guitar wandering off on its own.

Shorter, Hancock and a graft

“Footprints” comes from Wayne Shorter’s “Adam’s Apple”, 1966. It is the piece where Shorter shifts the tonal centre to make the music feel like it is leaving the ground, with Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman and Joe Chambers behind him.

“Dolphin Dance” comes from Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage”, 1965. Madlib does not leave it whole: he grafts “Peace”, another Horace Silver piece, into it and lets the two play together.

That move explains the whole selection. He did not choose four tunes to redo. He chose four points in an archive to pull threads from.

We played them in a row in the originals, without any of Madlib’s versions, and you can hear what he was after: they all have holes in them, places where nothing happens for two bars.

Why it matters who holds the key to the archive

A hip-hop producer sampling jazz in 2003 was not news. What had not happened before is a label handing over its separate tracks and the permission to do as he liked with them.

The result, “Shades of Blue”, came out on Blue Note itself in June 2003, and the label now reissues it in the series it keeps for its classics.

An artist’s selection, when the artist is also the one with his hands in it, reads twice over: what he chose, and where he chose to listen to it from.