Listening to Madlib's music, I'm reminded of the Black radical maestros responsible for some of the outermost-limits music-making of the past half-century: Sun Ra, George Clinton, Lee "Scratch" Perry-- it's an elite club, but by no means an exclusive one. What sets these artists apart from their contemporaries and/or imitators is the fact that their effortless, genuine material occupyies the fringes of acceptable musicality without ever sounding pretentious; they translate their visions direct to tape and send them out into the world to fend for themselves. By definition, such prophets are prolific, and usually to a fault: who has time to edit existing ideas when there are already a dozen more waiting to be made musical flesh? It's a curse/blessing that makes for horribly inconsistent discographies with two or three full-out flops for every single flash of brilliance.
In less than ten years, Madlib has proven himself a logical heir to this peculiar tradition. He's already got more projects under his belt than Sun Ra had hats. Beginning with his role as emcee and producer with the Oxnard, CA-based Lootpack, Madlib has gone on to infiltrate the musical consciousness with an entire backpack worth of aliases: the helium-blunted rapper Quasimoto, the one-man nu-jazz band Yesterday's New Quintet, and collaborations under his more common name with Jaydee (Jaylib) and MF Doom (Madvillian). Like the aforementioned auteurs, Madlib's projects have their share of hits and misses, but the creativity and lack of stultifying concern for critical assessment clearly shows there's a lot more coming down the line.
It's a bit of a surprise, then, that an artist as multi-faceted as Madlib was invited into the dank catacombs of the original Blue Note master tapes for a "remix" project. Though he's certainly not the first to gain access to the house that Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff built, his predecessors-- Pete Rock, Biz Markie, Us3-- were cut from a considerably safer cloth; which presumably explains the decision to package the results as Madlib "invading" the Blue Note catalog, just in case his unpredictability happened to get the best of him. But, gentle executives, your gamble pays off two-fold: Madlib gets a shot at a significantly wider audience and the label has an opportunity to redeem itself for all those Kurt Elling and Joe Lovano records they've been haplessly peddling since the early 90s.
Appropriately enough, Madlib's multiple personality disorder creates the "shades of blue" the title refers to. On one hand, he stars as himself, semi-dutifully remixing Blue Note classics by Gene Harris & The Three Sounds, Donald Byrd, Ronnie Foster and Bobby Hutcherson into outsider works of downtempo and instrumental hip-hop art. With the exception of Bobbi Humphrey's "Please Set Me At Ease"-- which Madlib and guest emcee Medaphoar transform into Slum Village hip-hop-- there's nothing overtly radical about the remixes, but closer listening reveals strange happenings in their murky depths, as the role reversal of foregrounded breakbeat and buried melody on the disc's centerpiece "Stepping Into Tomorrow" illustrate exquisitely.
The rest of the tracks are "new interpretations of Blue Note classics" by Yesterday's New Quintet and its offshoot ensembles Morgan Adams Quartet Plus Two, Sound Direction and the Joe McDuphrey Experience. Don't be fooled: this is entirely the work of Madlib and his uncanny ability to play a disorienting number of instruments, and his equally clever habit of inventing names for each member of the fictional band(s). As a result, these pieces are slightly more linear in construction, relying more on harmony and tempo dynamics than the loops upon which the remixes are largely built, but are similarly genius in terms of both concept and execution. Madlib even goes so far as to fake a live recording for the Joe McDuphrey Experience's medley of Horace Silver's "Peace" and Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance", only to give himself away by chopping up the mix beyond recognition in the middle of the piece.
Judging from the results of this encounter, I'd like to see Madlib let loose upon the Saturn catalog, or crafting a Yesterday's New Quintet record of Parliament-Funkadelic tunes like the one he concocted in tribute to Stevie Wonder last year. But if his creative impulse moves along at anything remotely attuned to the speed it has so far, I'm sure there'll be five or six more Madlib-helmed records to sort through every year from here to Armageddon as he hits and misses his way to defining his own Black radical cosmology.
