Cream always rises to the top
Kassa Overall - Cream
I’m not an expert on hip-hop. Apart from being very into the early DefJam stuff when it came out, it’s never been in the centre of my field of vision. I’m more likely to know the tunes sampled in hip-hop tunes than the actual songs themselves.
On this, his new album, Kassa Overall covers eight hip-hop tunes, seven of which I know nothing about and one I’m only vaguely familiar with. I don’t think this makes me the intended audience for this record. It means I get to hear it without the novelty of knowing the original.
This threw up a bit of a weird one: I have no prior knowledge of Big Poppa by The Notorious B.I.G., which gets a delicious bossa nova treatment on this album. However, I know the sample, Between The Sheets by The Isley Brothers, that was used in it really well because I bought the 12” when it came out, so, to me, it sounds like a jazz version of that. I wonder how many other old duffers are getting into this in such an arse-about-face way.
The tunes stand up as decent jazz workouts, with Overall’s unique, thoughtful and clever drumming front and centre. According to the sleeve notes, these were all one-take recordings. I look forward to hearing the originals in the wild one day and recognising them from this record.
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