One inventive way of undeading an earlier album by bringing it back from the status of not being a new release even if fairly recent is to do a songbook album and or a remix. And you get both here - nearly. Lionel Loueke re-recorded his parts of his songbook album so it's not a purist remix at all but certainly ''reimagining'' takes place with much gusto.
Drawing on big chunks of the Herbie Hancock history making catalogue as interpreted firstly on HH that Lionel, Herbie's guitarist for years, delivered so excellently two years ago is the jumping off point. Read about that excellent album also on the Edition label here.
Now enter Gilles Peterson one man promo phenomenon and the biggest media player on the UK jazz scene bar none. In at the birth of acid jazz, important in A&R at Talkin' Loud and on the live jazz dance scene at Dingwalls, nowadays breaking new artists on Brownswood - early on including Elan Mehler now a label boss himself in the States and José James and most recently the brilliant DoomCannon - and fronting a popular 6Music radio show aimed mainly at a non-jazz BBC radio listenership the man doesn't get time to sleep it seems.
A serious artist as well as a very expensive DJ to book? Depends what you mean. Certainly Gilles has been bolstering his credentials in that regard in the last while hooking up for a street funk revisiting with Bluey and here upping the ante a whole lot more with Lionel, one of the world's greatest jazz guitarists it is not at all rash to claim.
The Peterson approach is to make anything he does shiver and glimmer with beats and a party vibe whether latin excursions or skittering rolls and rumbles that keep you guessing going all the way back to the Wag Club and Bar Rumba. And you get that here a good deal. That doesn't mean it is at all trivial but it certainly is not an album for hours and hours of jazz fiends to chin stroke to and outJones one another with talk of jumping with Symphony Sid.
Herbie himself knows how to do a party vibe given his mastery of jazz-funk but that was only really displayed when Blue Note opened the catalogue to Us3 and when Herbie himself unleashed his biggest hit in decades in 'Rockit'. As good as HH? That's the question. No. Very different for sure so it's apples and pears rather than something exact you can put up against the other.
But I enjoyed the record especially the scuffling sensation that Gilles brings to Man-Child's 'Hang Up Your Hang Ups'. Gilles is no Madlib but definitely if you like clubby soundz and manage to remove your jazz snob digit from a fundamental area of the body for at least half an hour this is essential and of course makes us rethink what Peterson is all about all over again. In Herbie speak Gilles can be seen as a chameleon himself and deserves a whole lotta respect hanging with Lionel and in their togetherness making all these amazing tunes simply sing in a different register.
Out on 25 November
Gilles Peterson and Lionel Loueke. Photo: via Edition
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