You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - The Jazz Samples That Built Hip Hop

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Hip hop wouldn’t sound the same without jazz. From A Tribe Called Quest to PinkPantheress, jazz provides the groove behind of some of the most iconic tracks of the genre.Diallo Riddle and Luxxury of One Song join Adam and Peter to geek out on deep cuts and the genius behind hip hop’s greatest jazz samples. We explore how sampling has shaped both genres, why the art of “borrowing” has always been part of the jazz tradition, and why some jazz musicians don't get paid for their contributions to hip hop.If you loved our episode with Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding from Switched On Pop, you’ll love this one. We cover a lot of ground, so dive into our full playlist of every track we discuss. Find that here. YHI x Switched On Pop episode on jazz influences in hip hop. One Song episode on Patrice Rushen's "Remind Me".One Song episode on A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation".Get our newsletter for bonus stories that didn't make the pod:https://youllhearit.com/newsletterStart your free Open Studio trial for ALLLLL your jazz lesson needs: https://osjazz.link/yhi 

Peter Martin. Hey, what's up? I'll tell you what's up. I'm excited about today's show because on today's show, we've got the guys from the One Song podcast joining us. Oh, I love that podcast. You're talking about with Diallo and Luxury? Exactly.

It's a great show. And those guys have such cool names, Diallo and Luxury. And we're sitting here with just Peter and Adam. It's okay. It's okay. But I thought maybe today we can give ourselves some really cool nicknames. Oh, okay, I got it. Chickeria and Herbie Hancock.

It's a little on the nose. I like where your head's at, but it's a little too obvious. What about like I'll be Rialo and you can be top shelf? How about if I'm top gun and you're Seallis? I don't think I want to be Seales for this show. No, but what if it's Maverick and Goose? You know what? No, no, no.

I think I'll be, I'll be, I'll be sure. All right, that's good. Then I'll be Christopher Williams. Oh, I'm dreaming. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Music Explored. Explored.

Brought to you today by OpenStudio. Go to OpenStudiojazz.com for all your jazz lesson needs. Peter, we say it every single week almost nowadays that it's a big day. No, you know what? We're throwing out all those previous weeks where we said it's a big day. Because today, I mean, look at this.

This is a big day. We are so thrilled to be joined by Luxury and Diallo from the incredible one-song podcast. We're such huge fans. Thank you guys for being here. Thanks for having us, guys. Thanks for having us. I think we're going to geek out.

Oh, man. We've already been in here. You're geeking out. We're going to go next level, right? For sure. So this is kind of a, this is kind of the second part of a coin where a couple of weeks ago, we talked to the lovely gents from Switched on Pop about jazz musicians playing on popular recordings. We focused a lot on, like, Robert Glasper, on Kendrick Lamar stuff and who?

Sorry. Okay. Bobby G. And, but we, in that conversation, we said, we should really talk, like, have a whole distinct episodes about samples. And we thought, well, who better talk to you about that than these two guys. So we're stoked. We're going to dive deep into some of our favorite examples of samples of jazz recordings used in hip hop.

And honestly, there's so much to pick from. I was just saying before we started, this is the most full our illustrious iPad has ever been setting up for an episode. That's right. We should have got the higher memory model, but that's for another discussion. Yeah, yeah. But it's interesting that, you know, Adam, you're kind of putting the ground rules in, which is interesting because I think you're going to be the first one to stretch the ground rules. You said samples of jazz

records. Rules are meant to be broken. In hip hop. Come on, man. What are we doing? I think luxury, Della, myself, all, you know, we understood the assignment. So a little foreshadowing there. We'll see if you did as well. Well, maybe we can just start. I know this is going to seem very basic for you all, but let's talk about

jazz. Well, I was going to actually say like, how are we defining a sample, which is maybe a little bit more complicated than or less straightforward than the scene? Yeah. But how would you guys define a sample specifically used in hip-hop? Is this a trick question? No. This is what I'm saying, right? It seems like, oh, yeah, everybody... Reuse of recorded material in a new composition. That would be the technical, boring, dry definition.

Do y'all give them some color commentary? Oh, here we go. Here we go. Facts are me. Black guy bringing the color. Check it out. I think what we want to say right off the bat is that we really adhere to the rules. We're talking samples for the the most part we're talking samples in the jazz field and we're not talking about something that my co-hosts podcast friend has talked a lot about which is do you want to say it interpolation interpolation i knew it was coming i knew we were going to say i was like who's this is not that episode this is not that episode sorry this is not the interpolation episode

so if you're sampling if you're sampling uh you know lani smith you're sampling lani smith you're not having some guy come in and replay. You are, I mean, actually, that is where my dry definition comes in handy, because there are people for whom the distinction, they're unclear, the difference between an interpolation and a sample is an interpolation is a replayed musical idea from another composition, from another song. A sample is you literally take a piece of the recording and you put it in to the new recording. Could be a sound, could be a loop.

If you're in Jamaica, could be the entire rhythm, the entire track. But that's the main distinction between the two terms. And it's interesting because sometimes interpolation, it's hard to tell that it's a re-recording of a familiar original recording. And sometimes a sample is hard to, as we're going to find out today, it's hard to pinpoint, wait, is that actually from that record? Because we know that producers and DJs will mess with the original sample slowing it down, speeding it up, changing the pitch. It's been so transformed from the original that it is a new sound, a new group of sounds, a new loop. I have a feeling that what's going to come up a lot today besides genre porousness, which we've already alluded to.

I don't think my pick kind of deserves to be called jazz, frankly, or excuse me, hip-hop when we get to it. I will be, my pick is the one that will be maligned collectively. Oh, I disagree. I love it so much. No, it's a good idea it's hip-hop. I don't know that it's technically hip-off. I don't think it makes the clip.

I think it is absolutely hip-hop. Okay. And if I have to go to bat for your sample, your example sample I will I mean hip hop light is that a term hip hop light because that would

well what would no I mean listen I think let's as I like to say let's rip the bandaid off in their early 90s specifically there was this whole conversation about what is hip hop and what is not what should say hammer proper rap

is not pop if you think that then stop you know like there was a lot of gatekeeping going on but I don't think I don't think that anybody would say look the jazz artist actually had a the jazz artists who were sampled by US 3 or us three, they were excited to be like relevant. And in the news again, I think that, you know, there was something about the dude's flow

and the fact that we didn't know him previously. If Q-Tib had jumped on that track, it would probably be considered one of the great hip-hop songs of the 90s. So I think let's give them a little bit of slack. They were trying something different. Yeah. And yeah, we'll talk about it. Well, now that we're here, I mean, we're kind of here.

We've already dropped what it is. We were going to save it to the end. I didn't mean to jump to the head. No, no, no, I think now everybody's... Let's keep it in order. Let's keep it in order. All right, well, stay tuned to the end of the episode. It is very good.

I guess we'll kick it off where we had planned to kick it off, which is, Peter, your pick. You want to tell us what you picked and why you picked? Yeah, I did. I think we're going to go all around. So this is really, I'm excited to hear everybody's picks and takes and your guys' reactions to mine as well. But I was thinking about, you know, jazz. There's so many great samples. But this idea of...

And, you know, Bob James is famously the most... sampled artists of all time. Of course, a lot of people don't necessarily look at him as a jazz pianist, but he's very much coming out of the jazz tradition. Herbie Hancock is up there, number three. But a gentleman by the name of Lou Donaldson was the sixth most sampled. And a lot of... Who's compiling that?

I don't know. Because that was our production team. Let us know that. That's down the list. It is down the list. But the idea is this sample, and a lot of it is actually Adrease Muhammad, who was an incredible drummer from New Orleans, 13th Ward. out uptown New Orleans.

But, you know, he played with everybody from, actually with Bob James, Ahmad Jamal, Horace Silver, Betty Carter. But he also played with Sam Cook, a lot of R&B drummers, but he brought that New Orleans flavor. So on Lou Donaldson's 1967 Blue Note record, Mr. Slingling,

this is Ode to Billy Joe. And it's become one of the most, you know, this is the biggest part of the output of Lou Donaldson's sample. And it's basically been used as a drum break, as a drum groove, as an underlying groove. It's been chopped up and everything, but check it out. It's Dr. Lonnie Smith on the B-3.

I think so, yeah. But I mean, like, the precision of that groove with the snare drum. It's got the New Orleans street beat thing. And it's on its own, which, in especially early days, makes it very easy to sample and get some clean sounds out of it. Yeah, absolutely. And also just the way, so this is an RVG, Rudy Van Gogh, great jazz. Friend of the pop?

We're not sure. We're hoping he's... Enemy of the pod, maybe? We've been a little bit hard on his piano sound, but he could record a drum. And apparently him and Idris were really tight. Adreis loved the way he recorded. So a lot of this for sampling,

of course, the engineering is a big part of it. But what Adrease plays on here is just genius. So should we check out the first one? Maybe go to the most famous one you think. This is probably the most famous. Because the devil's trying to break you down. Young and restless. Yeah.

Almost the exact same temple, too. That's Kanye West. Jesus walks. Kyle's dropout can I just say yeah given everything this happened with this dude the line we're at war with ourselves takes on such a different meaning now he is absolutely projecting in such a outrageous way man I to quote Kanye I miss the old Kanye I remember dude I remember those days this whole album call's dropout is so interesting to listen to right now because you will get like it'll be like oh my gosh like what he said back then and so

It also makes it kind of sad because it was so incredible. It's so sad. It's like you lost a friend. It is. And you know, anybody who's ever had a friend and the friendship got ruptured for some reason, you're just like, damn, were we ever on the same page? Or did we just think we were on the same page? I mean, like, I'll say my favorite, my favorite Kanye records are literally late registration and graduation.

I think that those two took what he started on college dropout. They took it to a whole other level, the sampling. the looping, like, you know, just, there's, but gosh, we're at war with ourselves. Now when I hear that line, I'm like, Kanye is at war with Kanye. Right. Kanye was ahead of his time. Major downer. No, no, no.

He was ahead of his time. He might have looped back around to now being behind the time somehow. But, I mean, I think that those, like, that's actually sort of, I've always felt like that's the trilogy, right? That's the sort of trident of Kanye. That was the true, yeah. You know, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Graduation was when he permanently, you know, he famously, it was like, um, in Britpapap they had the Great Escape versus what's the story of Morning Glory? And in hip hop, you know, like two albums. Everybody's like, if you're a fan, go out and support your artist. And graduation came out the same as some 50 cent album,

which I don't even remember the name of it. And Kanye beat him. And everybody was like, well, that's the passing of the torch. And it really was. I feel like after that 50 cent was never sort of like the marquee artist that this new generation was becoming. Right, for sure, for sure. Well, speaking of marquee artists,

the next artist that uses the O'Do Billy Joe sample with the Greece Muhammad is another huge album here. Zaya. It's so distinctive with that role. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah, this one they actually took out some of the inner,

the snares in between, but the roles there. This is, of course, Zion from Lauren Hill's miseducation of Lauren Hill. And who produced that? Who produced Zion? Who produced that song? I don't know. Do we know?

We don't have that information in front of us. We don't have that. Our Wi-Fi is off. We don't know what that is. Well, I mean, there's a connective tissue right there. I'm seeing that it looks like it was produced by Lauren Hill, who actually gave a production credit to Che Guevara. Oh, nice.

I didn't realize he was that busy in the studio. No, what's crazy is that, you know, think about Kanye's very first all falls down is a sample of Lauren Hill. So he was clearly digesting, not just Lauren's, vocals, but like some of her production. So he might have actually heard that drum on Miseducation. Yeah. And thought, oh, I'm going to put that on to Jesus Walks. See, this guys, this is real podcasting. I know. I know.

It's amazing. Can we talk about sharp 11, sharp nine chords here? I'm getting nervous, man. We've got just two more here from the Odebill real quick. I didn't know that this was it at all. I remember the song. Oh, yeah. This Eminem from the Marshall Mathers at LP. Getting back to the wall I'm stacking up all their minds Toilett's talk Yeah, because I'm talking a lot of sheep

But I'm backing it all up But in my head There's a voice in the back And it hollers after the chase It's that press roll, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's almost like that New Orleans Like a tambourine, you know,

yeah, yeah, yeah. It's awesome. And then Peter, you pulled this one out, man. I don't know where you got this. Well, this was on my mind. I actually didn't remember this, but I just saw the Spike Lee Denzel, Washington movie.

Aesap Rocky, of course, is in that. Oh, yeah, yeah. And when I saw his name pop up as a possible sampleee of this. So this is LSD Love Sex and Dreams. Yeah, not the drugs. There it is. There's the press roll. So here's the stem of this just to hear the drums.

Slowed down. He chopped and screwed it. He chopped and screwed up those. Lud Donaldson. Yeah. And I mean, that one even, like, the whole thing of like that groove. See you one more time. It's such a foundational.

the original here now before we leave this one actually before we started Diallo you pointed out that this that organ hit is actually sampled in this liquid song from the alcoholics we loved the name of that group we thought they were the best

name of the album is 21 and over classic there it is there's the hit So good. That's some good stuff, man. That's some real good stuff. Cool. Well, all right.

Next up, we're going to go with some of Diallo's picks here. So Diallo, you started with the Heath Brothers, The Smiling Billy Sweet Part 2. You want to tell us about that one? Yeah, the Heath Brothers, American Jazz group out of, I think they were out of Philly. And, you know, they're just one of those groups. I feel like, you know, jazz and hip-hop were so.

symbiotic in the early 90s because I think that you know the rappers were listening to what their parents were listening to and specifically East Coast rappers you know the guys like Q-tip and Premier and Pete Rock you know you got the sense that they were definitely listening to the soul and the funk of the 70s but like their parents had dope record collections because they were also hearing you know everything from Bobby Humphrey to this song the we're going to hear from the Heath Brothers. This song in particular, I really like because it's been picked over.

It's like bison in, you know, Native American culture. Like, it's been picked over every single part of this song at some point has been used in somebody's great hip-hop classic. So I think that, yeah, when I think about some of my favorite sampling, this one tends to come up because I just hear so many songs that have used various parts of it. And at least this first part of it, too, is so easy to spot because it's so distinctive sounding that you can hear it fairly easily. Here's the, right from the beginning.

You getting your thumb piano? What are you reaching for? No. Watch this. Here comes. Here comes one more part. Let this part play. I got you.

Because it was about to go, it was about to go to the next sample. Yeah, watch, watch this. Just keep this in the back of your head. Here comes. Okay, now you can. Now you come. So that's Jimmy, Percy, and Tudy Heath, the Heath Brothers. Smile and Billy Sweet part two.

Before you play it, I just want to say, like, this is such an interesting thing to me because I actually got a chance to play with Jimmy Heath when he was still around, you know, amazing saxophonist, and then Percy was the baseball. I mean, I used to transcribe his bass lines from Miles Davis' records in the 50s and stuff, and Tudy, of course, legendary. Like, this is so atypicals of the stuff that they were known for. A lot of the stuff we're listening to today is the A-Tipald. typical cut on the jazz album.

Yeah, and I think it's such a, like you talked about the connection between hip hop with, and jazz. Yeah, and jazz from, you know, your parents listening to it and then cutting up the records, you know, crate dive in and all that kind of stuff. But I think it's such a, like it's maybe a little bit of an untold story about how hip hop, especially producers that are able to find these gems. They're not going to like the most popular Heath Brothers stuff.

You know what I mean? They finding these little gems. They're looking for something. They're not looking to say, we took this Miles Davis kind of blue and sampled it. That's actually not sampled that much. It's the other stuff. It's super interesting.

Okay, can I just ask a question? Because this is one reason why I love doing the podcast with luxury because it sounds like, I always say I'm dumb in the sense that like my public education, my public school education failed me. Other than the drums, I don't really play a whole lot of instruments. So sometimes, Blake, can you tell me like, do you know what instrument that is?

Because it sounds to me like vibes. It sounds like gray hair style vibraphone. But it also sounds like, it sounds like Peter and Adam, it sounds like you guys already know the answer to this. Yeah, I'll let you guys answer if you already know. It's, I mean, I have some of these, but it sounds like this African instrument that's this half gourd shaped and then these metal tines. It's called the Thumb piano or a columbra, sometimes call it.

They get very big or they get very, very small. But that's what it sounds like to me. Yeah. Wow. To me too. I think we talked, there was an Earthwin and Fire episode. I think we alluded to to Maurice playing that on one of his. Oh, nice. Nice. Ramsey Lewis tunes, I think, something like that. They are murder to tune. If you've ever had to tune one, you need like, oh, yeah. Plires. Yeah, because you have to adjust the, yeah.

Yes, my father had a Glimba, and I used to fool around on it, but, you know, my father was part of this, like, collective of black artists in Atlanta called the Neighborhood Arts Center. And so my house was literally just, it was a bunch of, like, you know, congos and Columbas everywhere. And that was, those were the, but I remember, yeah, I used to have to take a thing and just bend it. It was very, it was very... You got to pull it in and out of where it's attached to the cord. Yeah, because the length of the thing would...

I have not thought about that in a hundred years. But the sort of like... The sort of imperfect tuning is actually the sound of it. Actually, let's check out the Heath Brothers one more time before we put the samples in our ears. And that's Stanley Cowell, a lot of them. Great jazz pianist. And Columbus.

And Columbus. I really love... I don't know what instrument that is. Love it even more. Yeah. Oh, and also just to DAL, to your point, raise your hand if you went to public school. Just so we know where we're all at. Come on.

Okay, Blake's, you know, so we're going to need some corrections and some check-ins from you. Sorry. At least in strong. That's make me smart. Let's go with probably the most well-known, well, maybe the most well-known version. This is, uh, Nause one-love. Oh, my-old. You got six news on that jack kid.

The shit is real. Hey, yo, hey, yo. Hey, yo, hey, go. Oh, go. cigarette man Here you go, here you go Here you go Check it out, man

Check out what I got here, man What is that? What's that? Yo, you got That's all City, you guys It's already in there Here comes for real

What up, kid I know shit is rough doing your bid When the cops came You should have slid to my crib Fuck it black No time for looking back It's done

Plus congratulations You know you got a son I heard you Oh A lady right shit Who That's when she got Hyip or flipping

Talking about he acts too I listen to that whole thing. That's from 1994 as Illmatic, of course. That was such a breakthrough. It's so hard. It's so hard to even cut a Nas verse in that period short because he's telling a whole story. Yeah.

Like, it's just, you know, Shorty don't cash. He's a snake, too, running with that fake crew that hate you. Like, you know, like, he paints such vivid pictures on Illmatic. It's crazy. I really love the use of that sample in that track, too, because they're like pumping it in and out

you know, they're keeping, the producers keeping like the Q-Tip. Q-Tip produced it. So the piano chords are in there, like, I don't think a lot of producers would have kept in there. It almost sounds like- I don't hear any, by the way, saxophone in there. Did you, I didn't hear any saxophone. I don't think so. Yeah.

That's Jimmy's, Jimmy Heath's main instrument is. Exactly. Sax. You're right, right. You know why? Because part of my obsession, and if you listen to our show, you've heard me talk about this with, especially with sampling is when there's a disconnect. between what you hear used in the sample, like literally the performances in the section that was used.

Yeah. And then who's actually been paid? Who gets the songwriting credit? Right. And therefore who had to clear it? Only because, like, I've just been going down the rabbit hole as we've been listening on this tune. And so James Heath is the only Heath of the Heath brothers who was a writer of the smile and Billy, you know, the original tune. He's the sole, he gets 100% of the publishing on that. Therefore, when it gets sampled in the song we just heard, he gets 60% of one love.

Wow. And his brothers, who I think we're hearing, I don't think we're hearing. We're not hearing. Yeah, that's right. I don't think we're hearing. I think we're hearing what I've been calling, like, sample phantoms. You hear their performance. Yeah.

But they aren't named and they aren't paid. Yeah. And I think, you know, in this tune, maybe it's 2D Heath on drums, as you mentioned. It might be pianist Stanley Cowell, I see listed. The Perce, the Heath brother named Percy, again, not a writer. So that to me, it drives me crazy. Like, there's such a huge disconnecting copyright law. Yeah.

With sampling between who may have gotten paid for publishing reasons back in the day, but sampling hadn't existed, didn't exist yet. And then fast forward to the modern day where the reuse completely is based on a completely different system than when the song was came out and it didn't matter. Let's connect that to Nause, right? Because we talked about that on a song. on a Nas song that sampled a Sting song. But the part that Nas sampled has nothing to do with Sting.

Like Sting didn't write and he didn't play it. But Sting, like Steely Dan, likes his publishing. And so he gets all the money. And the guy who Nas actually sampled, that artist, sort of kept out of that. It happens way too often, borderline more often than not, in fact, with sampling. But go on. I was just going to say real quick, also M. Tumang used to play percussion with the Heath brothers. Right.

That might be him playing the plucky. We don't know. And M-Tumey, for those you don't know, did Juicy Fruit, which was sampled by Biggie for juicy. This is right here. It's a lot of the same folks. Yeah, yeah. This is my next thing. Did you know that-and-that's-and-that-M-Tum-A's son?

Did you know that M-Tumay is also Jimmy Hits son? What? Yes, that's right. James M-Tumet, yeah. Another, I know, another Heath brother. That part I didn't know. I mean, Jimmy Heath was like, I mean, he only passed a few years. I want to say within the last four or five years.

What? Yeah. But, I mean, he's. This was a son he had when he was like 20, 19 years old. Yeah. Oh my gosh. He lived to be 93. Yeah, he was the last one.

And yeah, he was kicking it. I mean, I saw him at a jazz festival. I feel like last year, but it was probably six years ago. Probably six years ago. I was going to say. But it's a great point, luxury about about who's playing what and what is the sample actually built from. And because, I mean, even your ode to Billy Joe with Lou Donaldson. It's all Adrease Muhammad, you know, and Bernard Purdy's famously is on.

But Bobby Gentry or Gentry. you say her name is the sole publisher of that song. So every song you heard the drumbeat in, Bobby Gentry's not a state, she's still alive. And the thing is with jazz, and I mean, even up to this day, this is such a different thing like you were saying, Blake, how it's like, yeah,

it was only one of them had the songwriting credit on that, Jimmy Heath. That was not only was, but still is super common in jazz. It's like very rare we, like we're always in the studio collaborating on stuff, but only one person takes the publisher. You know, why we're dumb? The man leader is right. Yeah, the band. Because we're dumb and we want to stay poor.

That's the jazz musicians. Well, wait, why is that between the two of you? Why don't you have a 50-50 split? I don't mean to start. That's a great question. That's a good question. That's why we're going to have you guys back to have that discussion. Guys, did we just start?

No, but I mean, listen, we're so curious. Like, I didn't mean to jump on it. No, this is typically how it would be. This is a little bit of oversimplification. But you're especially back then, like Blue Note, prestige, all these like classic recording CTI, even going up into the 70s. Like the band. Yeah, that's a whole whole number.

another sample world. Freddie Hubbard, George Benson. But typically, like, you'd come in with the tunes. And you might have a tune that somebody else in the band wrote, but just they wrote it. You bring it in. You either teach it or there's lead sheet or you've been playing it on the road, but it's one person. And then everybody might contribute to it, but there's no, like, where's the line between, like, if you're just adding some parts and some solos and some little, you know, finger things or whatever, that's never going to rise to the level of part of the tune, you know? It probably should, though. But here's the thing. I strongly, I think that's been my experience too, and I understand that that is the case for the most part. That is the established way that it is. But it also comes from an era of two things. One, there wasn't any revenue to be made. If you're a performing musician, if you're a jazz performing musician, you didn't really think necessarily beyond the next gig. Or the next gig, meaning live performance on stage at Birdland or whatever, or the next time you got hired to record. So you're motivated by two things, not rocking the so you get the next gig and not necessarily being educated because I had a publishing deal for at least

two years before I understood what it was. Publishing is complicated. What the two pies of writing, like writers share and publisher share, it's an obtuse, complicated business and it is easily misunderstood or just never explained, right? So all this to say that I have, I'm glad you guys are buds and I'm not going to jump in there and screw that up. But I do, I do have strong opinions about like, yeah, what rises to the level of credit as songwriting to me often is based on power dynamics and I want to get hired again and not be, you know, a problem. Yeah. Not be a diva over here.

And it doesn't really reflect the reality that since that norm was established a long time ago in jazz, in Jamaica, in rock, Herbie Flowers famously with like the Lou Reed, right? And the tribe called Quest sample that you only hear Herbie Flowers baseline in, but he got paid 50 bucks that day. Right. Yeah. Hip hop didn't exist yet in 1975. All that stuff to me is a big reason why copyright law needs a huge, huge overall.

It needs a huge rewrite. And also, to your credit, like, I'd always assume, like, oh, man, if I had been alive in the 20s, I would have been on Tin Pan Alley every day. You know, I would have been down there just copyrighting the songs. You know, like, here's a song about, here's a song about escalators, you know, like, they were just invented. And then, uh, my favorite Bob, Mr. uh, sketch of all.

But Blake, unfortunately, told me, racism, racist is ugly head again. And a lot of times these black musicians had, you know, they were basically kept out of tin pan alley. So once again, you know, like there were so many barriers, both, you know, mental and institutional, that kept these guys from knowing their real, their real worth. Well, I think, I think, like, your instinct about just like not wanting to rock the boat, especially during this era of, I mean, these guys were making dozens of albums every year, like as a side man. You would go to the studio all the time. For one day, you would make one album.

You'd sit in, you'd sometimes not know what you were doing until you got there. You got there. They called the tunes. You played the tunes. You got your 50 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever it was going to be. And that was a good day. You know, that's a good living to make. But you're not thinking like, well, I'd also added the intro.

If Nause ever samples this. Yeah, yeah. There's no consideration of that. And just to sort of counter, just one last thing, and I'll get off my soapbox about this topic. Just to counter the, like, logical thing I can imagine a listener or a comment are diving in YouTube right now. There is

that's just the way it is man that mentality to me is nothing that's not a good enough response. Like that's just how capitalism works man because then you then don't take the gig like it's not an option. When you're a musician your options for how you get paid

are pretty limited. Your knowledge potentially about the industry your ability to access a lawyer to vouch for you. All of that is very limited if it exists at all. So the idea that you could just like not take the gig if what you were offered the 50 bucks and not a split of the publishing wasn't

good enough, you don't have that choice. Absolutely. I mean, and think about this. Are we part of the solution or the problem here? Like we're going to clear rights on all this music when it goes up on YouTube for this episode and then Idris Mahomet's not going to get any of the... Oh no, he's not going to get a penny. Blue Note Records

will for sure. Lou Donaldson... Bobby Gentry's estate will be fine. Right. Lou Donaldson's estate maybe through the writing part of it. But it Drieh Heath, 60% over there, but the rest of the Heath's 0%. Exactly. Exactly. Now that everybody's completely forgotten what the Heath Brothers

sound like. Let's check back in with the Heath Brothers here. Hold on a second. Let's forget Rick Beato's going to give us a little more information. Swipes in and like Oh, it's so great. Here we go. The vibe. So that's where we left it off.

And then can you play this? Because Red Man sampled it very similar to Nanz, but I love how he just let the beat completely right. Like he didn't change it at all. You know? It's a play. Nah, motherfuckers.

I was flying through the motherfucking sky. Slowed it down. Full of a lot. Bobbi's the Super. Man, pop maluga. Blast don't stay trooper. I'm on the run, G. I got these whole spread

from Japanese to diabetics. So good. That's from Red Man's 19. 1996 album Muddy Waters. It's incredible. Great album. And then you have one more on here, Diallo, from the same year as I'matic, you have The Beat Nuts. They're self-titled album from 1994.

The Beat Nights, very similar to the alcoholics. They sample another part of the song. That part you highlighted. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes. The Calimba. Something on a Guinness stout. Yeah.

There you go. There you go. Oh, so good. I just love sampling so much. And you know, you said something that I wanted to call out real quick. I love that people are finding these songs that are not typical of the rest of the jazz artist's catalog. Yeah. I like the fact that they, as much respect as I have for those artists who take something that's obscure,

but they're taking the first couple of seconds of the song. There's another song that I wanted to talk about, which is, Ahmaid Jamal's I love music. This is a nine-minute epic, you know, opus. That's what we call a typical jazz track. No, but this is... It's free TikTok.

This is kind of a weird Amad Jamal album. Awakening is the name of the album. It's amazing, but it is very... It's not live with the Pershing. It's not point Sienna. Of like the Heath Brothers, that record as opposed to the... It's almost the same kind of thing.

It's true. But if you could, if you'll indulge me, can you play like the first... seven seconds of the very beginning of this song because I want people to know that this song starts off one place. And you have to go like five or six minutes into the song before you ever get to the part that we're going to talk about. Could we just hear like the first seven seconds of the song? Absolutely. Yeah.

I want to like be in my mansion throwing a glass of wine and a painting of my father. It's definitely you know. So specific, you know. Was it good enough for you, dad? Like that's what I want to be doing. It's definitely. It's the beginning of the the film before the credits and then we find out why he's so pissed off at his father later.

For sure, 100%. The money couldn't fill the whole of his soul. It never can. It never can. Well, I can get close, though. Let's find out. It really is just a beautiful, beautiful song. I'm making fun of it right now, but like, this song, like, when I listen to the whole song,

I never get tired of it. It's just a gorgeous, gorgeous. I was on a bike one time in Paris a long time ago, and I had this in my headphones, and I was just like life doesn't get any better. It's just a beautiful beautiful song, but let's skip ahead. It gets weird. Oh, it gets very weird.

It gets weird. Here's a little weird. He rock finds something. And that's it. That's all he used. It doesn't repeat. It's not moving. It's like there's just that little section. One more time here. Herel and Riley?

Here's another noise. Again from the old attic. It's nice. Great use. I mean, like, to take just that tight, it's like when DaV Punk, when you see how they put together a song, like, one more time, like they took just these tiniest little pieces of nothing.

And just that's what makes sampling an art form because really it's such a small part that they technically, I always say they didn't have to sample it. Like they could have just played it. Probably nobody would have ever drawn a connection. But that's sort of what makes it an art is that, no, I'm literally, Blake famously, you know, put together group is in the heart by delight

and showed us how that song is entirely not one musician was brought into the studio to make that song happen. It's all layered samples on samples and I think that Pete Rock's taking this tiny little piece. That's the genius of great sampling is that tiny little piece and built something

magical off of it. Yes, absolutely. And most importantly, this was recorded and came out in 1970. Same year I was recorded and came out into the world. Very important. And actually Caleb, if you could throw up the album cover for this Amajimaal, The Awakening album, it's a beautiful

album cover from that era. Absolutely gorgeous. Here's another example of, I think this is Pete Rock, too. On Buck the Rines. E-L-E-2. Listen to the wind so I can hear the earth me in the universe. Speak round. A celebration of my birthday.

That being said, we can stop pretending in our mental. Like all the shit we witnessed be happening, coincidental. See, back in 98, when I dropped the first extinction level, I was fighting in the demons with personal scores are settled. put it in a movie because they knew that we ain't really know. Funny how they're trying to tell us 22 years ago. It deeply impacted her watching the flick really moved me as the world was ended.

Morgan Freeman was prayers in the movie. So let's fast forward to 2009, the 2012 movie left an impression on the minds of the people making sure we remember if we slightly doubted that the world was ending that we can't really do shit about it. Damn. So this is what- Wow. By the way, what you're doing what you're doing live in the studio right there? I'm all for it. It sounds fantastic.

That's an interpolation. This is definitely an interpulation. I just want to give just some shoutouts to jazz musicians for what they bring to this party. Dude, that's what this whole episode is about. That's what I'm saying, man. But this is what Imajima brings. It's like this beautiful, this beautiful C minor 9 voicing, right? And I think he's using this sort of block chord structure where you have the octaves on the outside.

And going up a minor third, right? I think it's, is it like an augmented thing. Right? Does that seem right? Or like a B minor major 7 kind of thing? We just lost all our listeners. As soon as you said the name of that chord. I just want to just shout out that because it's like...

We do that all the time. I can't speak those terms. Luxury can speak all of that. Oh, and I couldn't find those chords. That was beyond my chromatic, you know, my spiciness. But that's the kind of thing that I think as jazz musicians, when we hear hip, when we hear jazz samples and hip hop,

we're like, yes, like that might not happen with just the producer, playing piano chords. It's like having this genius Ahmad Jamal who's so not only comes up with these incredibly creative harmonic devices, but the way he plays them too is like world-class pianist. It's really, I think, brings a special thing to these things. I mean, I know the original recording too, just the way it sounds and everything, but the actual what he's playing is super special. Yeah, for sure. And so cool that it gets to be like amplified out and for, I mean, you know, the counterargument to this is like, oh, they're only taking a little, you should listen

to the whole nine minutes. And if you're just, you know, it's just to be like, and you know, you're on a bike in Paris and you can do that, that's great. But it's also like this sends people back down the rabbit holes, like what does that sound? Or they make that connection when they hear the original or they hear Point Ciena or something. I'm like, wait, that's the thing. No,

I love that point. And I even point out that if we went back and played the little section that Pete Rock sample, it's not like he looped it and you can just put it in the Serato DJ app and loop it. No, like he cut it up. So like he did take

a little snippet here, a little snippet here, reverse it, and then he put like an extra note right here so that it would all line up to be 4-4. Yeah. But it's, yeah. And I'm going to, I'm going to do a little hot take here and say that there's a through line to what jazz, especially like coming out of the bebop era.

And who was that that we were just famously, oh, Roy Hargrove said, you know, hip hop is the grandson and the granddaughter of bebop. Like, that's the direct line in there. And, but, like as jazz musicians like we're constantly taking little phrase little parts when we improvise a solo that's exactly what we're doing like when you're sampling it's not just like the most unimaginative players and these people don't get gigs and we don't even talk to them they're beneath us but they'll learn a

charlie parker solo on a blues and then get up and just play that solo nobody wants to hear that not because it's not a good solo but you can go hear charlie park on a record you know now you take part of and no one even wants to hear you play the exact phrase and then your phrase it's like using your musical taste and taking little bits of that, you know. I mean, Miles Davis was the master of that. Like, he was basically sampling Clifford Brown and Fats Navar and Lewis Armstrong, all these trumpet players, little phrases, and everyone was like, oh, he was a genius.

But it didn't know that he played out of trumpet that hadn't been played before that, for sure. Yeah, part of this storytelling, it's linked to DJ culture, which we talk about all the time, is another undersung musicality tradition is DJing. So there are people of certain caliber of, you know, maybe snobbishness or gatekeepingness that would say, well, Dijing's not, you don't know an instrument, whatever, and same with sampling. But in fact, really what music is intended for is communication and storytelling and a lineage, a tradition. And when you're calling attention to things that you like, things that came before you, things that you think

other people should seek out, little references, little homages, interpellations in sampling are just part of that larger tradition of musical borrowing, of using what music came before to tell the story you are telling now in your individual way. I love it. There's something, hold on, I'm borrowing that term, musical borrowing. I'm going to interpret it. I love that. Something is sticking out to me with this sample with Buster Rhymes specifically. We don't have to keep this in the show, but what's the Buster Rhyme song that uses the Bernard Herman sample from Psycho? Oh, the string thing. Yeah. It's very similar harmonically to what Amad Jamal is playing here. It's like almost exactly like this minor nine to the augmented a half step below.

It's like a similar thing that Bernard Herman uses in what phrase. One of those Hitchcock movies or something. I don't know if that's interesting. Here it is. Yeah, no, I think that's really, it's like, give me some more. Give me some more. That's it. Yeah.

Incredible. But the strings, it's a similar vibe, which I think is interesting. I think Buster Rhymes just sounds good over these like cinematic. I'm going to throw my scotch into the fireplace kind of vibes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Next one up is this was really interesting. interesting actually. Diela, this is another one of yours. This is Young Holtz Unlimited. Unlimited, right? That's pretty much it. That's pretty much the sample people use. Yes. Strangers in the night. And then it goes into a more traditional. Yeah, I'll let it late. To the Lambert Airport Holiday Inn.

Are we playing at the wiki room? Welcome to the Howard Johnson. Yeah, Howard Johnson. Let's hear that intro one more time. Tiki torch time. Yep. Very cool. A little bell there. Yeah.

Triangle. Is it a triangle? You could have never known. So this was sampled into return of the Crooklyn Dodgers by group called Crooklyn Dodgers 95, but this was from a soundtrack to a film. Play from Brooklyn, better known as Brooklyn. Never taken shorts because Brooklyn's the barrow.

Straight from Brooklyn, better known as Brooklyn. Never taking shorts because Brooklyn's to borrow. We did it like that, and now we do it. it like this. I don't know we do it like this. Yeah. The metaphor that's from my brain to my jaw.

It comes from other places. Not the tinted places. Journalistic volumes are yellow. I don't know, man. I think that's a bell. I think it's a bell. Or one of those. What are those things?

So question here. And Blake maybe this kind of harkens back to some things you were talking about about copyright. So, Strangers in the Night. Do the songwriters from this get some of that sample? Because there's none of the melody.

And whoever the tin pan, I don't know who wrote them. Oh, yeah, Strangers in the Night. This has been happening a lot to me recently. I am finishing a book about musical borrowing, and it is a taxonomy of all the manifestations of it. So there's an interpolation chapter and a sampling and covers, and it's funny because it keeps happening. Today I'm writing about John Coltrane today, after this and before this.

I'm writing about my favorite things. I'm writing about the phenomenon of jazz covers. And of course, you mentioned bebop before. Part of the bebop tradition comes out of the recognition that when you do that, you lose all your money. So let's like flip this one on its head, change, not use the melody in the head or the solo. Contrafacts.

And call it something new. Contra fact, exactly right. There's a whole contra fact chapter. But the short answer is, yeah, the composers of strangers in the night, which I'll look up right now. But it's certainly not the trio of young Holt and such. It's posed by Bert Campfort, Charles Singleton, and Eddie Snyder.

Those guys were definitely hanging out on Tin Pan Alley. You know those dudes were. I mean, that's where the money goes on the compositional publishing side for the original. And if it's cleared properly, which we have to assume at a certain point, it was, they would be getting all of that publishing money as well. Man, I think it's not the young whole trio, not the drummer, not the bass player, not the bell It's apparently Frank Sinatra's most commercially successful album of all time is the one that produced this one in 1966. So yeah, those estates are probably still just making all kinds of crazy money.

But the crazy part is in terms of like what they sampled, there's not even any of the harmony. It hasn't gotten to any of the tune. This is, this brings us to my second term I'm introducing in the book. But I'm throwing out there on our own podcast and your podcast. And just because it's fun to test these words. out. But before I mentioned sample Phantom, you hear the bass player, but he didn't get paid, right? The opposite of that is, who does get paid? I'm calling that a credit ghost. And in this case, the three dudes I just named from the Strangers in the Night original, who wrote that melody

and that lyric, once that got transformed by Young Holt Unlimited in 1966 into this jazz odyssey, it still gets baked into the part that was sampled, even though that melody and that lyric isn't in there. So they are still getting paid. Even the lyricist. Even the lyricist, even though it's instrumental. That's the same thing that's happening on the Coltrane in the Coltrane situation. Right. Richard Rogers. Rogers and Hart. Right. Rogers and Hart. And it's instrumental. So there's no lyrics to speak of. So it's a crazy, another disconnect in how copyright works. Yeah. Is that all the way down the line all these years later because of not anticipating the future and then not changing things when the future came. We have these strange.

disconnects between what you're hearing, who wrote it, who got paid, which part was used. I'm so glad you're talking about this, and I'm so glad you're writing a book about it, because it is something that we've all just, I think, our whole careers have just said, well, this is how it is, and this is the rules that we have to play by. But you're right, it's archaic the way that we're approaching all of this, and it doesn't make sense in the current way that people make music. Right. We have to change it, and just, like, literally, there's Sona, which is the Songwriters Association of North America. I'm not sure if you guys or members worth checking it out and perhaps joining it's technically impossible songwriters can't

have a union it's against the law great that's great so there are musicians unions there's instrumentalist unions there's you know studio musicians but songwriters that profession is for reasons historically there there isn't anything where power can be we can unite and have power to negotiate right right so this is a group that is trying to act impact impact power songwriters essentially. And it is a stated goal. I'm saying this because I just got off the phone with, if you don't know his podcast, Ross Golan has a great show called, and the writer is. And he's giving the keynote. And he and I just had a really long conversation where it's like, we need to like advocate for, we need to start advocating for change basically. We're all tired of these stupid roles.

It's just the way it is. Hey, you got your 50 bucks on the day. Sorry you died broke. Sorry you couldn't pay your medical bills. The number of drummer biographies on Wikipedia. who got sampled that I read and then they died at 41. Like, come on. Right. You know, let's get these guys pay, let's get them health insurance. Anyway, all this, that's, I said I'd get off my soapbox. No, no, no, no. Stay on.

And actually, I just remember the Adrease Lou Donaldson thing, Lou Donaldson, Blue Note, shout up Bruce Ludval, who was the president and the head of Blue Doe Records for a long time. Great guy. But I remember, and I don't want to speak

too much out of term, but I know that this, some form of this happened. Like, they actually got Adris funneled a lot of that sample royalty as it came in. And Bluno, of course, really worked hard at that. And Lou Donaldson authorized that too. So that was the rare occasion,

not because they had to. That's wonderful. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, yeah. Was that on the, that was on the master's side, like, as opposed to the publishing side maybe? Yeah, I think so. That's great.

I think so. That's an option. But Lou Donaldson knew was one of the funniest guys ever, he used to always make jokes about, you know, like hip-hop, beep-b-b-b. He had a real high. voice, you know, and he'd be like, I don't know what, I never respected that until I started getting them checks, and then I respected, you know, he had a whole shit that he did about that,

you know. But luxury to your point, if, if musicians are reliant on the benevolence of record labels to, you know, make their living, it's never going to have, you know, it's good that Buno did that, but it's not a, it's not something to build a career on. Now, um, let's move it along here. Uh, Dea, you threw this in sort of, uh, here in the last bit before we started, but I really enjoyed this idea. So we mentioned Bob James at the start. Most sampled musician. Yeah.

According to, I don't know, chat GPT or something. Okay, good, Peter, good. So Diallo, you brought up Westchester Lady. Come on. Bob James 3. Yeah. Looks a lot like a Pink Floyd album cover. So what is it about this?

Where else can we find this? Well, let me just say real quick. yes, I think that Bob James is like one of my favorites. Anytime you put on a Bob James record, you always hear just an avalanche of sampled parts from other songs. And you're just like, oh, I know that. I know that one. I know that one.

And I did, admittedly, this is not a flex, but on the way here to my laptop desk, I texted Patrice Russian, who's been on our show. Drop that name there. You might look on the floor. I did ask her. I was like, hey, you know, Bob James, like, you know, my father was really into bebop.

My dad was really a bebop guy. And I remember, like, I feel like he did not dig the Bob James sound. You know, like, to him, that was like, sort of like easy listening jazz or something like that. Yeah, yeah. And I did ask her, I did text and ask her like, hey, what did, what did, like, the black jazz musicians of that time? Like, what did the George Binsons and the Roy Ayers' and what was the, what was the, what was. what was their impression of Bob? Did they think he was cool?

Did they think he was like easy listening and corny? Like what was the take? And I did not know at the time that you guys had played with all the illustrious people you play with. Have you ever heard that about Bob's reputation? Like is Bob like, was Bob at the time considered corny or was he always thought of? What did Patrice say? I'm dying to know. How did she?

Yeah, totally want to know it. She has not rid back in. Honestly, I've heard nothing but love from Bob. James. Yeah, first of all, Bob James is one of the nicest, most humble, sweetest guys ever. And, you know, I met him when I was actually a teenager. He was super nice to me and even kind of seemed like he pretended to remember me the next time I saw him. And so I'm a little bit clouded judgment. But I think like the people, you're talking about Roy Ayers, like really like sort of Grover Washington Jr. I think that Donald, Donald Byr. Donald Byrd. I think they all really

liked him and was, I don't think there was like a corny, like, I think that there was the more hardcore jazzers that as they got into the 70s were like, y'all stole our music and we can't get any gigs because, and it was really, I was some joking, smooth jazz. I don't think that term was even happening yet then, like, in the 70s. No, definitely not. But I think like, whatever,

fusion and groovy jazz, you know, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zavinal, that whole, Jacco Pesto. I mean, like, jazz, jazz adjacent, whatever was happening them, like Bob James was right in the middle of that. And he was, I love that. I love that. Yeah. But I mean, I think that there was always like, and Herbie, I know him and Herbie have always been tight and Chick-Korea.

I think that there's always this backlash to any of the successful jazz. And look, most of the times they're pianists or keyboardists that sell out and go Hollywood. I mean, this came against Herbie, for sure. Once you have a hit, once you know, Bob James wrote the theme to MASH. He did a bunch of TV stuff. No, he didn't. He wrote the theme to Taxi. Taxi, that too.

Who wrote MASH? There's good, too. The Suicide is Painless Swo. No, that's Bob James, man. That's not Bob James. Come on, it's Bob James. Okay. Okay.

Anyway, TBD. No one will put it in the comments. We don't have to worry about it. Oh, Johnny Mandel. Who was the Bob James of that period? That's a great spin on that. Bob James, by the way, he put out a, I had to just check this, but he put out a killing tiny desk last year. Yes.

Like he's still like Bob James is. He sounds great. I love that. I love it. Listen. Yeah, go ahead. No, no, I was just going to say also he's always had a little bit of a sideline career. I mean, Billy Kilsen, who was a good friend.

for many years. I mean, I've played with him since the early 90s. Has kind of always been his go-to guy when he wants to do a jazz trio. He'll go do a little tour in Europe, like just playing straight ahead. So he's got the chops and the lineage coming from that. But I mean, I think that whatever, especially by the late 80s, getting to the 90s once he had four play, and it probably got into a smoother kind of situation. I think that was, he definitely got caught up a little bit in that, that smooth, you know,

Lee Rittenauer, that whole. And when Wintmarsallis was kind of come along and be like, everything needs to be acoustic. I think the jazz puritanism of that mid-90s has eroded. And I think everybody's sort of embracing the smoothness of the era that we're discussing here with Bob James at this point in jazz history. Because it's, I mean, all the kids are, that's what the kids sound like. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? And I love, like, hip-hop didn't give a shit.

They're just like, I like, I like that. Like, what can I do with this? I mean, Bob James has a lot, has a lot of hip-hop to thank for his resurgence and his career being this long. Like, he may have flamed up much earlier. had it not been for his music being rediscovered and put in some seminal recordings to the point where at the Mardi Gras, or sorry, Tait Me to the Mardi Gras, right? Ding, ding, ding, that is the sound of hip-hop, just the bada-boom, either just the Phil. If you use that now, or we did an episode on Missy Elliott Work It, right? Which famously, the very end of it, is kind of a coda. You hear, interestingly, an embedded sample of Take Me to the Mardi Gras, because it's the Rundium, sample of it. They didn't have to do that. They could have gone straight to the source, but it kind of gave

it, the song was intended to be a throwback kind of old school OG hip hop love letter. Yeah. Right. So in that usage, there's reverence to the history of hip hop, which includes this Bob James sample, which incidentally is a cover of a Paul Simon song. That's right. So Bob James didn't get Sam, doesn't get any help of saying when that gets reused. That's right. Yeah. Finally, finally, Paul Simon can be. Finally, Paul's getting some recognition, some money. Yeah, finally. Hey, watch this. Watch this. Watch me tie it into what Blake just said, because Blake said the Missy sampled the Peter Piper. Peter Piper, right? MDMC version, not technically the Bob James version. And similarly here, Pink Panther is an artist

who I am a big fan of. I think she's very exciting to speak of what the kids are into. I really like her music. So there's a line you can draw from Westchester Lady, which we just heard, to a seminal drum and bass track that was huge in England called circles. And this is by an artist named Adam F. Can we hear a little bit of that? Samples of Bob James? Go up to the night. Here we go.

You might skip it ahead just a little bit so we can hear a little bit more of the West just a little bit. I had a kid up in mind. Oh, sorry. Here we go. What's the cue number? I don't have. Go to the 43 second mark.

Gotcha. I can find that. Here it go. I love that. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. So this song was like huge in the UK. And Pink Panthers has sort of made it a point to sample, you know, artists like Underworld and basement jacks and some of these, you know, like sort of 2000s,

British electronic artists because that's when she was young. That's great. You know, that's the music that she was growing up with. And so then she takes this Adam F Circle song, which sampled the Westchester lady, And then she turns in a song that I love called Break It Off. And you'll hear what she does with it. Right? Just adding some vocals.

No one ever saw me cry. That you said to me. That came out of his mouth for a nightly. But I'm so easy to me. So my 15-year-old daughter, who really is at the stage where she turns up her nose to anything I like, just asked me to take her to a Pink Panther's concert, her and a friend.

And knowing, and I don't really know Pink Panther's yet, but knowing that there's some it's a chicken out. She's great. There's some Bob James. There's some basement jacks going on. It makes me very, very happy for my daughter that she could say. Listen, her new album is called Fancy That. There's a song on it called Illegal

which blew up on TikTok. If you hear it, you might recognize it. I find that even my friends who aren't like, you know, buried in music, new music nowadays will be like, oh yeah, I've heard that song sort of around. Fancy That is the name of the album. I hit up my friend Junior Sanchez, who's worked with basement jacks in the I was like, guys, there are like no less than four basement jack samples on this album. And that's not even counting like when she samples like MJ Cole and some of these other UK garage artists.

But she's, you know, we're 20 years past the early 2000, sadly. And so now that generation that grew up on that music is resampling. The first generation of Coachell artists, I think you could call it. And she does it so well. I'm forgetting the name of her co-producer. But I think Pink Panthers is doing it really well. And for those who want to hear some new music at a very fast clip, but like really fun music that sounds like it's got some life in it. Fancy that is the name of Herala.

And I'm just laughing because like here's another opportunity. It really is like the last 30 days and then they turn the manuscript in and it's three years. So now it's my chance to sort of test the waters with a couple of concepts that I'm not sure are going to fly. So here it is. I'm calling that musical dendrochronol. Excuse me. Fuck. I fucked it.

musical dendrochronology. In other words, it's like the tree rings, right? You take a slice. And inside of any song, of any musical moment, you're going to find something connected to the previous thing, built on the previous thing, built on the previous thing. And what's so cool now for hip-hop fans is we're kind of at least at the third level. This is sort of the third era.

There was the original, the OG. Then they started to sample some of the samples. Now we're starting to get some samples and references to the samples, which themselves came from the jazz, you know, the original sources. And that's awesome to me. Because this is just the literalization, because it's recordings, of something that was already happened in all of the other music with interpolations and references.

The history of music is this has already been happening, but it's not a recording, so you can kind of hide it, or it can be more subtle, or it can be, you know, modified or altered slightly. But in recording, we have this, we're living in a cool moment where we're having this new layer that's starting to emerge. One could almost say the whole history of pop music was interpolation until soft. That's right. Like sort of softer like folded in so it was

not as noticeable, right? Not as obvious, yeah. Yeah, and I mean in jazz because jazz just happens or maybe because of sort of the beginnings of jazz as we know it were right when recording technology was happening. You're talking about the 20s a little bit before. We can track the whole thing. Yeah, exactly the whole thing and there's more of those circles in that tree but there's still always coming back around and now

with the hip hop, well, not now, I mean for 30 years now, whatever, more, with the hip hop sampling of this jazz, these jazz tracks, like that's disrupted the jazz tria. I would say in a beautiful way. You know what I mean? And as brought, I mean, is

Bob James doing a tiny desk at age 86 or whatever last year? Had he not been sampled all over the place? He's still the same composer and player, but you know, like, you know. But it's funny, said that because I was just talking to a friend of mine who's a producer about the grain, basically, like the sound of earlier recordings, right? Which we can track eras with our ears based on, we can kind of tell when something was made basically. From 1925, whenever 30s, like the

earliest cylinders and whatever, Her Majesty's voice, up until kind of the 90s, it starts to fall off. It's clean enough. Pro Tools. People, it's digital enough that anything from the mid-90s till now, you can kind of fake another era, you can either fake another era, or you can pick and choose from other eras what you want your song to evoke, right? But for jazz music, I was just thinking about this. Like, it's harder for me to want to listen to jazz post-fusion

because I like the grain. I like the 50s jazz sounding like this, and then the Basanova 60s sounds a little like this. And it's like some of the constraints of the technology and some of the instrument choices. I like that you can map what you're hearing to when it was and maybe even where it was. And you can't really do that with modern jazz anymore

because it's too clean. And I'm just so used to jazz having that older sound, that era-connected sound. I mean, for me, I would even flip that to rock and roll. Like, I love 70s rock and roll specifically, and I think it's because of the sound of the kick drum. And I just don't get that. Like the 90s, I love the 90s,

I grew up in the 90s, so I love that. But my heart is really in that. 70s, but I hear what you're saying there is that we can hear the era that it's wrong. We did that. We did Fleetwood Back rumors a couple weeks ago, and I was just like, I forgot how great that record and like the drumming. But then when we're like really analyzing the drummer, I'm like, actually the drumming is not that great.

It's like the sound. Simple. It's just dry. It's so authentic. Yeah. And that bass, that kick drum and that authenticity and connection, it's, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. I got a fairly boomer pick here. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, I'm just going to say one last thing to connect to what you were saying, which is that you're also tapping into another element of why we like stuff, which is the nostalgia. Which is the when we heard it first. And when we heard it first, especially if we were 13 or younger, is going to evoke so much like stuff that you can't put your finger on because it's vague and you didn't know what the world was as much. And it's going to have that much more power when you hear it later because it's going to unlock this sort of, you know, Proustian Madeline of experience that you are going to probably experience. your whole life, right?

The rest of your life's a little bit like figuring out... The rest of your life's a little bit like figuring out what was 13 and earlier. Yeah. To a degree. So we peak at 13 in terms of our... It's all calling back after that. Pretty much.

Yeah. Everything's so damn romantic back then. Speaking of, I was about 13, I think, when this next album came out. This is Tribe Call Quest electric relaxation. Where would we be without Q-Tip, man? We've been talking a lot about Q-Tip later. I mean, I don't think we knew back in the 90s how much he was producing. You know, I think if you back then, I would have assumed that it was Alicia Heemohamed,

who did all the Tribe Quat Quest stuff. Yeah, I think he did a song for Nas, but like, there's so much he did. Yeah. He did the original Crooklyn Dodgers for the, you know, we just played for the return of a little bit earlier. He did the original. So he's just, he was so much more prolific than we knew. Yeah.

And I believe, I might be, I might be screwing this thing up, but, I mean, it would map for sure the Q-Tip, because he's right around, I think he was born like 70, 71. He's right around my age. But I think he had a parent, maybe his mom or something that was listening to a lot of like kind of soul jazz stuff, a lot of the blue notes stuff, a lot of that, like same kind of thing. Come up, I think he talked about that.

Well, that factors right into the samples. So that the little piano... Yeah. That starts the track is from Ramsey Lewis. The Great Chicago's Finest. A track called Dreams. Another very weird... Atypical.

Totally atypical. Oh, this is that Earthwind and Fire track I was just talking about. Maurice White is on this. Oh, wow. That's right. Played drums on this, right? Blake? Actually, he may not be on this song, but he was in Ramsey.

Actually, he'd already left, my bad. By 73, he'd already formed Earthwind and Fire. Drummer Jason Marcellus just made a whole post about Maurice White in Ramsey Lewis's band, and he was like hanging out with Ellis. I didn't know. I had no idea. So that's that piano sound. But the main chunk of the sample here is from Ronnie Foster's Mystic Brew.

Yeah. One of the great bass lines of all time. Yep. That is the definition of vibes right there. That's such good vibes. It's vibes. Vives play providing vibes. Literally vibes.

And then the drums from the tribe track are from, I did not know this, but this is a band called Brethren. This is a track called Outside Love. I've never heard of this. It's from 1970. but this is absolutely smoking. Speaking of kick drums. So meters.

So New Orleans. Brethren. They're from New Orleans? Yeah. Well, I'm just saying that beat and that vibe. I was just thinking the meters. I'm like, this man has checked out the meters for sure. Yeah, yeah.

And you put it all together. Back again. Man, it's such an interesting thing because, like, for me, it would be so much easier to like, I can hear all these different. parts, how they could fit together to be something dope. But I would just be like, let's just all get the studio. Like, okay, check out this drum part, play this.

Like, that's the jazz musicians approach to it. Like, it's almost harder. Well, I mean, you know what I'm saying? Peter, what you do is pretty fucking hard, dude. But I'm saying, like, well, it's harder to, like, not make a hit as a jazz music. I see that's why we're doing nine minutes track. It's easy to not make it. Nine minutes of going nowhere fast, you know.

Right, you're sort of, I think the implicit question sometimes that people ask. A lot of times in our comments is like, why sample? Why not just remake it? Why not just be creative? Which is sometimes a case a turn in that direction. And we want to like shut that down right away. I mean, I think we can all agree that this is incredibly creative. Exactly. And just before, because y'all and I are probably both thinking this, we did do an entire episode on this song of our show, one song. So go check it out. Yes. Because you've made it as far into this podcast. You're almost done. Go listen to ours after. But we broke down and recreated those samples. So we found exactly how they did it.

And you can sort of listen and, you know, sort of... And it's really twisted. I mean, like, it's so much deeper than just even sampling it, the manipulations that they had to do to get them. This is 1992 technology. Exactly. It's pre-ABLEton and splice loops, right? So it's Bob Power, who is the engineer on that session,

was helpful in making happen the vision. But just to land the plane of what I just said, I think to your question, Peter, about like, or not your question, but like, here's how I would do this. Yeah. And as a musician with access to a studio and musicians, you might correctly think this is a way to get a similar thing done. My quick thought I just wanted to add, going back to our grain conversation, right, is the sound matters a lot. And the specific sound of something sampled has meaning to it. It has referential meaning.

It has personal meaning because in this case, right, we were just talking about how Q-Tip, it was in his, you know, maybe dads or mom's record collection. So there's this childhood association of literally how that vibe recording sounded of that snippet. So I think just sort of part of to anyone probably listening to your show is not in this camp. But for anyone who's like, why that's so complicated to use samples? Why not just play it yourself? part of the answer lies in that the sonic quality is different and the meaning is different when you use a sample. You have these other aspects beyond just the notes,

beyond just playing the parts. Absolutely. Yeah, and I mean, to me, it's like, you know, with visual arts, you could have different, you know, your painting, your watercolor, and you're drawing. Like, these are like different mediums, different ways of being creative. And they each have their, like we always talk about

restricted practices, but like constrictions to how you're going to create. And so the level of creativity you have to have when you're taking different samples, you have to use your creative mind to think of what it can be when combined with something else, as opposed, like as pianist, we always think, oh, we can be the orchestra, because we've got the widest range. We've got, we can play big chords. If you're a trumpet, you can only play one note, so you've got to get some other people together, whatever. But the reality is, is like when we arrange something for an orchestra, you have to use your,

you have to imagine what it could be and then have actual other people do that. You are thinking about that. You're thinking Tessitura and you're thinking of Tambra. Right? But those words also apply to sampling. Those are words from the orchestra and from the classical tradition, maybe, the jazz tradition. But they're important, too. Who is playing what sound, and what register at what part? Is it doubled? Is it tripled? Is it harmonized? Is it unison? Is it whatever?

All of that compositional arrangement stuff is also part of the sampling tradition and choices that are made. What to sample, how to transform it. And just one more thing because we were talking about the sample fan. It's the sample phantom thing applying to what you were just saying. On the episode, you'll hear us talk about this, but here's just a really brief kind of fun thing to think about is think about the band playing this song. It's drummer Rick Marada from Brethren, right? You're hearing drummer Rick Marada. You're hearing bass player, I believe it's Gordon Edwards.

There's also a double bass. There's an electric and double bass. George Du Vivier. I won't name all of them. But it's fun to think about like... Divi It was an amazing classic... He actually played with Art Tatum back in the 30s, I think. Yeah.

Wow. Incredible. Yeah, he's on this one too. Those vibes that are so prominent are George Devons. And interestingly, not Ronnie Foster. He played organ, but not on that fragment that's reused. Right. But he's 50% of the publishing tribe song,

because he's the sole songwriter of the original. Yeah. Amazing. Oh, that's so great. Well, guys, the time has come. I do. Us four will now be listening to... Luxury's going from like one of the peak of like explanation.

He's about to pull it all down. Or maybe not. I'm going to mute the audio for the next 30 seconds. Us four will be listening to Luxuries clip, Us Three. Canterloop flip. Oh, I see what you did. Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, we have something special down here at Birdland this evening. A recording for Blue Note Records.

Pee Wood Marquette. Just picturing the Keenan Thompson, no! No! I was just thinking, like, see what Blue can do for you. It's just been used in so many. Bitty, bitty, bitty bop and funky funky. See, I'll hear the bitty-bitty.

Only take two at a time. You're your middle-aged wife. I might have been shouting over it, and I apologize, but the most offensive parts of the song are the bitty-biddy-bop and the funky-funky. I can't tolerate. We're going to get to the funky, funky in just a second. But I didn't even include the sample from the Art Blakey, a night at Bertland, which has the introductory monologue from Pee-We Marquette,

who would introduce bands. Legendary radio host. Friday and Saturday nights at Birdland on 52nd Street would introduce bands. That's the only thing authentic is that introduction on this, the rest of it. I didn't pull the original because it's literally unchanged from what they played at all. I don't know if that's. if there's a word for that luxury in your upcoming book, but just using exactly without anything else added to it.

But that's what's going on. They just sampled it wholesale, like, you know, MC Hammer can't touch this style. Is that what you mean? Like, just the loop untransformed. The opposite of what we just heard on a Tribe Call Quest. Exactly. Right.

But it's also not melodical. Like, what is that when you're sampling, when you're just taking somebody talking, right? And there's no... Oh, I see what you're saying. Right. And no musical accompaniment. I mean, are you saying

like from a copyright standpoint, you could make the case that it's I don't know, man, you probably have to pay for it no matter what, even though you're not hearing any of the song it's part of, right? It depends on who your lawyer is and their lawyers. Maybe if they're friends, they can make a deal between the two of them. Yeah. I was just going to point out

real quick that, um, because I listen, I'll still always maintain that there's nothing I think where this song probably falls short is the lyrics because I don't think musically it's that bad. I I think it's, I think you said you have a problem with bitty, bitty bop and funky, funky, which, you know, I can promise you that that was not, you know, necessarily the soundtrack to my drives, you know, as a teenager.

But, but I think that, look, you know, we were just talking about tribe called quest and the genius of Q-tip. I will maintain that if you'd had, you know, butterfly from Dingwell Planets or, you know, guru from gangstar or a more capable MC, this could have been a really interesting trap. And one of my all-time favorite samples is Art Blakey of the Jazz Messengers. We were just talking about Q-Tip sampling. He samples a song, oh, gosh. Oh, it's that da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Yeah, Q-Tip sampled that in something, I think. Yes, you're right. Oh, that's actually that's, I was going to say that my favorite, a chant for blue, a chant for boo. A chant for boo. Can somebody just play the first part of a champ for boo? And that was Ar-Blakey's nickname. This is Art Blakey and the jazz messengers. Check this out.

Art Blakey's nickname was Boo. See, that's good. But you see what I mean? Like, you know, like all the parts and pieces for genius. By the way, a chant for boo is just, that's, that might be in my top five top jazz samples of all time. All the, all the greatness was there. And I did, correct me if I'm wrong, the whole point of this was to was for Blu note to be like, hey, guys, you know, come to us. got all the jazz.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Well, for sure. It's just, you already nailed it. It's just insufficiently transformed to me. And it's, it's sort of a hack job. Listen, I didn't know much about it before. Name the MC.

Like, named this MC. I think his name is Rachine or something like that. Was he from London? And the guys of us three are British, they're British producers. Like, there you go. They should have gotten some New York guys on the scene to like, if we had gotten, if Premiere or a Q-tip or anybody else had flipped the sample, because you're right, what a great opportunity.

Sanctasia, I agree. They opened the catalog to say, listen, it's like they do this now with writers camps, right? Like primary way, we'll gather a whole bunch of songwriters and say, use our catalog, interpolate these old hits, make a new hit with something familiar. That's what they were doing, which is great. It's very embracing of sampling. I'm just saying, in this case, no shade to Jeff Wilkinson from London and his production partner, Mel Simpson, who I know nothing about aside from them being Us Three's production team.

and you know it's a little bit to my ears it's not the pinnacle of hip hop production that's all I'll say it's sanitized it's pop hip hop I mean it's like that it's sanitized for people who don't know the story so us three is the first hip hop act signed a blue note records with this idea

use our catalog for the samples and we haven't played it yet so the name of the the name of the track is silly though it's not like they couldn't have used I mean you know anybody can record catalog it's all silly but the the name of the us three track is Canaloupe flip and we haven't played it yet but of Of course, this is from the Blue Note recording from Herbie Hancock's Imperian Isles, Canelope Island.

Which is groovy as hell. Freddie Hubbard on trumpet. As a pocket. By the way, they should have sampled Freddy on that. Groovy as hell. But Herbie's not, Herbie's trying to make something very commercial in this time. He's writing this, like, using it in commercials as well.

This was groovy jazz. For sure. It's like a boss. It's more of a bossa inspired. It's not, it's not. swinging. It's literally straight eight notes, right? So there's no swinging in terms of the jazz use of that word, but it swings because of the drumming and the performances. But that is all gritted out in a pre-pro-tools way, to me, in the flip Plantasia version. It's a sort of strict.

So we're about to hear the funky song. I got it. Okay, so I've been trying to defend this song. Baby Dibov. It sounds like that guy from Battlestar Galactica, the robot. Biddy Bid Botte. No, you're right. Is that Battlestargo? Right. Meen, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. No, okay, now I'm going to throw them under the bus, because I do remember me and my hip-hop friends.

Because that is definitely how we were self-identifying by 92, 93. Yeah. We would laugh out loud at groovy, groovy, jazzy, funky, pounce, bounce, dance as we. Yeah. Like, we thought that shit was hilariously packed bad shit. Yeah. So, you know what? I try to defend it.

It's like when I say six, seven in front of my kids. You're no longer defending it. They don't. When I say six seven in front of my teenagers, you're taking your hat out of the ring. Six seven, six seven. Well, look, I'm going to take it to another, a different level of breaking this down.

Hold on. Before we do this, I just want to get to the funky, funky real quick, because maybe the best sample that is not, it's only used for the vocals is Lou Donnell. Back to Lou Donaldson. What's that? You remember Funkin' Mama? Oh, right.

This is Lou Donaldson. Everything I do going to be funky. All the yas are used in Channel Loop. Because everything I play is going to be funky. And this track is what I won in my life. This is what I won in my life. And he went live. He said everything's going to be funky.

This was not improved upon. And then everything he played was funky. Yeah. And he only said it once. It was the funky, it was the funky, funky part. I don't think it was just even the repetition. I actually believe that for a large portion of my teenage in 20 years, just the word funky is the lamest, corneous word in the English.

Like, nobody ever was like, oh, that's funky. Like, you couldn't say it with a straight face. I don't know that I still can. So, no, it was bad timing. It was like, no. Yeah. Well, what I was going to say on the, not to go back to the, Us 3. Is it US 3 or Us 3?

It's got to be Us 3, right? I think it might be U's. I think it's the three. Use, like, use guys? Use. Well, it says the name was inspired by Us 3, a Horace Parlin album, the founder of Blue Note. That's Horace, Parlin. They went deep on the chorus. That's a deep cut.

Yeah, wow. But one thing is they screw up the melody, too. So it's, uh, bo-to-to-de-de-de-bo-da-d-d-d-bo-da. And then it goes down to here. Boodoo Bibh, Boodoo, do that, which is like obvious. Like, that's the equivalent of the funky. That's amateur hour right there. That's amateur shit.

Because the melody is. Herbie plays that, that clashing. That's part of the vibe of the tune. Like, they sanitized the melody even. They didn't have to. They were on Blue No Records. They got the publishing clear. They put it into the Berkeley Chord Scale Theory.

I hadn't noticed that before. Can you play that section of how it was? So, if you're listening to beginner musicians play this at a jam session, they're going to play it like this. And also how cantaloupe people have it. That's all right. I mean,

they're kind of on the wrong thing. Good. We're still on the one chord, the F. Then it goes. The D-flat 7. Herbie. Same melody.

That's the Herbie version. That's the Hermitage. But they go, but they don't use the melody. They put a blue note on it. I see. Yeah, that's the funky. They move to the second chord.

Yes. Yeah. And the whole fun thing. You know, Herbie's stuff is always a little, you know, and it's just kind of like, you're literally like, oh, let's wash off, what's the British accent? That'll be taking it too far, but, you know, they're washing it off in a way.

By the way. But they do that, so Us Three does that too? Us Three may as that changes the note. Yeah. Let's check it out. Because they're not sampled. The trumpet's not sample on here. Somebody's playing it.

That's not Freddie. Got it. They didn't sample Freddie Humber. I don't think. It might just be a cheap corg-triton or keyboard. Yeah. Pretty real for 1990, too. That's not their real.

That's not their real. I'm just now realizing that people that do this probably know this song from the Canaloupe Flip. Yeah. And not from the original version. Yeah, they would be. So they're playing the wrong version. Yeah, anybody like in their mid to low 40s, later 40s? I feel called out.

Do you play it that way? No. Of course not. I mean, that's just a stupid thing, whatever. But I think it does go along the lines with everything is just. But I do remember around this time being like people, like this was a hit, wasn't it? Number seven on the billboard. Damn.

Man, there's no problems with bad taste. But I mean, it's like there was, I remember a lot of people were excited about this. Ooh, this is jazzy because it says jazzy, jazzy, funky, lame, whatever. But I was like, that's Herbie Hancock. That's my hero. I know her. It was a certain amount in the jazz world of us really being excited. This is the closest during that period.

I remember that. I remember the jazz artist feeling like, hey, this is cool because like, because you've got to remember, you place it in this historical context. There was all this conversation, even James Brown, got in and I'd like, hey, if you're going to sample me, just keep you clean, brothers, you know what I mean? Like, there was no cursing. There was no cursing in Cantaloo, you know what I mean? So, like

it was almost like jazz musicians taking, taking the power back almost from these, you know, raunchy rappers. Right, right. So, yeah, it all played into it. Yeah, I mean, Ron Carter. It's, Gerard Presencer replayed that sax line in Us 3 version. Okay.

I just found that out. So you're right, it's replayed by the guy who played it wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean that, well, Ron Carter famously great bassist When he went on the tribe Was that on Marauders or was that on something? That was on the other one from that era Ron Carter on the base

That was Q-Tip on they're calling him out But he wasn't going to do the record Because he's like, I'm not going on My man Came out of the studio And his name is Buster Robes In effect

Shaheed is in effect This is just with Ron Carter and the vocals. Check it out. That's Ron Carter. Yeah, you're right. It's a low-end theory. Low-in theory. Thank you.

Thank you. But that's Rob playing on it. When they first called him, they're like, no, I don't do hip-hop because I don't agree with cursing. And they had to promise him there'd be no cursing in that. Versus from the abstract. And that's part of the reason, too, I think they're calling them out so much. Thank you, Ron Carter.

You know, they do all that. Like, thank you for coming, showing up. Yeah. I mean, I will say that I tried to play, speaking of the devils, I tried to play the beat nuts from my father because it was so jazz sample. Yeah. You know what I mean?

And I was like, yeah, you'll like this because this sample's all your favorite jazz records. I put it on. I don't think he got past the first course, but he's like, Phantom. Like, because he didn't like the cursing. He didn't like the imagery that they were provoking. So again, we look back now and like,

everybody seems so innocent because, you know, but it was, that language did not fly with guys born during the Great Depression. Right, right, exactly. Exactly. Well, luxury and Diallo from one song, thank you guys for spending this time. You've been so generous with your time and with your incredible knowledge. It's been just a blast to talk to you.

Yeah. So much fun. This is awesome. We've got to do it again. And everybody go check out one song. It's literally the opposite of 40 songs that we're doing today. Like, what they do. No, we do the same thing on our show.

We start with one and then we just, lots of rabbit holes and connections. It's fun. Yeah. We will link to your episode on Electric Relaxations so the folks can check it out. And we're also linked to the one with Patrice Rushing because I saw that that is incredible Patrice Rush, the way you guys, I mean, she's such a, you know, insider pick, but it was just so... And if you could put in a good word, too, we'd love to. Yeah, if she texts you back to tell her we said, hey.

She always text me back. She's one of these people she will always text back eventually. She might be on a plane somewhere. Yeah. But I'll leave it in the comments of this video what she said. Okay. That's great. Thank you guys.

Cool. Well, until next time, you'll hear it.