Ali Shaheed Muhammad & Adrian Younge - Jazz is Dead 19: Instrumentals

Following the star-studded release of Jazz Is Dead’s second series, the venerated label returns with an intimate offering of selected instrumentals from the Series 2 sessions with the legendary vocalist Jean Carne and keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith. Here, standout moments such as Carne’s “Come As You Are” and Smith’s “Love Brings Happiness” shine with a new focus on the process and craft behind them, and the intricacies of the era-accurate all-analog equipment used at Linear Labs Studio become more present. Fertile ground for putting on headphones and embarking on a hazy solo trip, the ten selections on JID019 are transporting and mesmerizing, each track reverberating reverence for the iconic Jazz-Funk sounds made famous by the likes of Carne and Smith, and represent some of the label’s finest work to date.

As soon as you hear the low-end rumble that opens “Come As You Are”, you immediately see the vision that Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad have in mind when choosing to work with vintage audio equipment and instruments. Like any great classic album, the percussion comes to life and engulfs the sound stage, animating the rest of the ensemble and propelling the inner paranoia from the saxophone and synths even further than the original. On “Love Brings Happiness”, a standout from Smith’s entry, the oozing distortion that creeps in early on shifts into a more prominent role, leading our ears and bodies through one of Younge and Muhammad’s most intense and kinetic productions in the series so far.

As the rest of the tracklist splits evenly between Carne and Smith numbers, the realigned focus becomes apparent; the drums on Carne’s fantastic “The Summertime” ripen and each rimshot further entrenches the groove as the keyboards drift a little bit further than before. On Smith’s elegiac “Visions”, the rhythm section and horns conduct an interstellar seance that could only be captured through tube amps and dusty keys, beautifully merging generations of Jazz, Funk and Hip-Hop in a few short minutes. Taken anew, this latest instrumental batch presents Younge, Muhammad, and their collaborators at their finest, and is a further testament to the label’s continued devotion to faithfully presenting and preserving analog sounds.