SANDRA NKAKE & VARIOUS ARTISTS / A Place For You

A Paris-based, bad sister from Cameroun has done it again. We wrote about her back in June 2009 and she is about to drop a new album, Nothing For Granted, within the next month or so, but late last year she birthed a stunning Gil Scott-Heron tribute and then midwifed 8 remixes.

The tribute used Gil’s riff on “Inner City Blues" and lyrics from “I Think I’ll Call It Morning.” Had she stopped there, that would have been aplenty, but being the bad somebody she be, Sandra contacted a slew of producers and musicians and got them involved in widely varying interpretations of her original tribute.

I’m not aware of any similar tribute in terms of contemporary music. Jazz musicians do interpret and reinterpret musical tributes on the regular, and of course there are numerous cases where a brace of artists are asked to interpret different songs from the catalog of a Stevie Wonder for example (and for sure there will be an Etta James tribute album released in the months ahead), but this delving into one original song that is itself a mixture of sampling and reinterpretation, well, this is really a whole other kind of experience. The kicker is that the whole project is available as a free download. I’m not going to go on about what I like and what I love on the EP—you got ears (and taste), make your own choices. I’m just going to urge you to check it out. The brilliance of this release augurs well for Sandra Nkake’s upcoming new release—this will hold me til the album arrives. —Kalamu ya Salaam   A Place For You playlist

1. A PLACE FOR YOU (GIL SCOTT HERON TRIBUTE)

2. Introducing-a-place-for-you 3. mark-de-clive-lowe 4. loik 5. dj oil 6. grant-phabao 7. dj vadim 8. jeff sharel 9. master in the words of gill scott &eq-07    

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2012 at 1:01 am and is filed under Contemporary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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