[Today: Beyond turntablism...]
Before there was mushroom jazz, there was Tokyo-born DJ Hideaki Ishi, aka DJ Krush. Inspired by an early-80′s viewing of the seminal hip-hop film Wild Style, Krush tracked down a mixer (not an easy feat in pre-hip-hop Tokyo) and became the first DJ in Japan. Asked about his influences in a 1995 interview, he responded “You know, rock, jazz… but what seems to connect with me the most is his-hop. So primarily my influences are what people now call the old style or Old School… artists like Kurtis Blow. Those were my first influences. In terms of DJs, there’s Grandmaster Flash and DST. Also my father listened to a great deal of James Brown and Miles Davis, so I’d been exposed to them from a very early age.”
Krush has spent his career coaxing extended hip-hop/jazz suites from his turntables, but Miles Davis’ influence on his music shows through most clearly on Ki-Oku, his 1996 collaboration with avant-garde trumpeter Toshinori Kondo. While Krush spins out languid atmospherics, Kondo blows pithy, elegant trumpet lines that wrap gracefully around Krush’s expert turntablism and recall nothing so much as fusion-era Miles (say Bitches Brew or On The Corner). That’s some pretty heavy company to put these cats into, but Miles was always flirting with what became the mushroom jazz sound, and if he’d lived long enough, it’s easy to imagine him making an album like this himself (the compilation Panthalassa creates just such music by grafting Miles’ trumpet licks to contemporary beats).
But even the great Miles Davis would have had trouble matching the seamless jazz/hip-hop fusion of tracks like ‘Toh-Sui’ and ‘Mu-Getsu’. Elsewhere, Krush and Kondo take Bob Marley’s ‘Sun Is Shining’ into downtempo mode, creating a completely different mood from the original and syncing it up with the liquid, luxurious tone of the rest of this album. You might not have Ki-Oku in your record collection, but it’d be a lot cooler if you did.
Listen: Toh-Sui
Listen: Mu-Getsu
Tags: Bob Marley, DJ Krush, Hideaki Ishi, Ki-Oku, Miles Davis, Toshinori Kondo, Wild Style
29 January 2010 at 2:22 pm |
I´ll certainly buy this one. Great stuff. Thanks for the tip.
29 January 2010 at 6:03 pm |
I like this. Thanks for un-burying it.