I’ve been listening to quite a bit of jazz recently and got into Yusef Lateef due to his work being sampled by several HipHop Artists. On the album Eastern Sounds we get some lovely jazz renditions of music from other genre and film soundtrack.
The blend of piano, drums, flute and Double Bass manage to complement each other perfectly creating a track that’s musically complex without loosing its smooth sound:
I watched Soil & “Pimp” Sessions last week at Manchester venue Band on the Wall. Their energetic performances and exiting take on Jazz has always made me a big fan and I wasn’t disappointed.
The night was wrapped up with their cover of the Love theme from Spartacus which was originally popularised for jazz on Yusef Lateefs album Eastern Sounds and used as a sample on the Nujabes song The Final View found on his album Metaphorical Music.
There’s something fundamentally fantastic about the melody of this piece, its simple yet manages to portray so much, being both joyous and mournful at the same time. Soil & “Pimp” Sessions have their own take on it diverging from the original source material in the same creative way that they became famous for when they covered wheel within a wheel years ago.