RELEASE DATE: 12/9/2022
The seventh installment in his Madlib Medicine Show, a jazz album with his Yesterdays New Quintet called High Jazz. Madlib’s been busy this year. And while his recorded output always spans the gamut, he often returns to recurrent themes, spread across the genres that serve as home base – or bases, as it were. Jazz is one such base. With High Jazz, Madlib begins anew – offering familiar jazz sounds from a series of “new” groups from his ever-augmenting cosmos. Call it “Yesterdays Galaxy.”
High Jazz, the name itself a tribute to the landmark jazz-fusion album released by Stanton Davis’s Ghetto Mysticism in 1976, shows a marked development in Madlib’s craft. Every element of jazz is there. Is that tune modal-funk? Was that song psych-fusion? Was that a bossa-tinged run or another kind of latin-affair? Where did that sitar come from? Madlib’s Yesterdays-excursions are never easy to categorize and that’s the point – while experiencing chops like these, the desire to rigidly define takes a back seat to aural pleasure.
Track Listing:
A1. Steppin' Into Tomorrow (Prelude)A2. Electronic Dimensions
A3. Pretty Eyes
A4. High Jazz
B1. Medley: Don't You Worry Bout A Thing (Live At Spear For Moondog)
C1. Interlude
C2. Reality Or Dream
C3. Drunk Again
C4. Funky Butt, Part 1
C5. Wonderin'/Nightime
D1. Space & Time
D2. Conquistador
D3. Tarzan's Theme
D4. Interlude D5. Kimo