Untangled samples make
for mellow delights
Ironically, it probably
would’ve been too expensive for legendary jazz imprint Blue Note to
license the hip-hop tracks that sampled from its catalog. Still, for
13-song collection Droppin’ Science, it would have been
nice, instructive and musicological to have the label’s
late-’60s/early-’70s jazz-funk mellowness adjacent to the equally
vintage hip-hop it mutated into via De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest
and others. Collected alone, one understands liner note writer
?uestlove’s classification of these un-samples as “the side of my
pop’s record collection that I used to avoid like the plague,”
especially given the music’s turbulent period of origin. Indeed,
the proto-disco R&B (Ronnie Foster’s “Think Twice”) and
flute-aided balladry (David McCallum's “The Edge”) are rather
smooth. But this music did the trick and found Blue Note a new
audience—or at least a generation of listeners open-eared enough to
literally make it their own.