Us3 - Flip Fantasia: Hits & Remixes (1999)

While many young jazz musicians spent the '80s and '90s looking to the hard-bop past for creative models, Us3--primarily Geoff Wilkinson on samples and scratches and Mel Simpson on keyboards, with both programming--managed to do something different with the same classic records. Their raids on the Blue Note archives put them at the center of the hip-hop/acid-jazz synthesis. They sampled classic funk riffs and solos, even interviews, from Herbie Hancock, Jackie McLean, and Art Blakey, and then overlaid them with rap and live solos by some fine young English musicians like trumpeter Gerard Presencer and saxophonist Ed Jones. This compilation pulls together the most popular tracks from their two CDs, Hand on the Torch and Broadway & 52nd, and then adds remixes of four of them culled from EPs. The remixes extend the creative process, sometimes completely transforming the original material, as with the electronic take on "Come On Everybody," by Q-Burns Abstract Message. This is effective contemporary dance music, but it's also a great rethinking of the jazz tradition. --Stuart Broomer