El-P, The Blue Series Continuum - High Water

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Free Music Notes for High Water

Free Music Review: The best Blue Series entry to date
Hit: 5 Stars

Regardless, Matthew Shipp remains the best living jazz pianist, period, end of story. Yet, one wonders if the group could ever make a throughly coherent effort end-to-end.

With "High Water (Mark)", they do.

El-P, the man who creates the creepiest and most fascinating beats in hip-hop today (sorry, Kanye) tackles a jazz project, with surrealistic and beautiful results.

Like Steve Lillywhite on Dave Matthews Band's "Under the Table and Dreaming", El-P manages to maintain the continuum's improvisational astetic while making it more concise and making it routed in simpler melodies. The opening number, "Please Stay (Yesterday)", is surprisingly controlled and mellow. Soon comes the 10-minute epic "Sunrise Over Bklyn", and even at its length, it still manages to be grounded in a melody and still be a beautiful rainy-day piece of electronijazz. "Get Modal" features an almost unrecognizable version of the Black Eyed Peas "Where Is the Love?" for the melody, and goes off in wild directions from there.

What the album maintains best is a sense of continuity. The title somewhat reflects El-P's production - he's hardly in the opening track at all, but as the album progresses, his presence on the collective is gradually felt, cumulating in the dark and oddly beautiful "When the Moon Was Blue", featuring a vocal sample of his father. He still throws in samples into "Intrigue in the House of India" (the electro-drum-tap opener) and, oddly, coheres to some pop song structures (admittedly the DARKEST pop you've ever heard, but still similar structures). And, unlike previous Blue Series entries, here there are no two songs that are even relatively similar. Each has its own feel and life to it. Not only is this Shipp's best effort, but it's also one of El-P's most consistant. This is one of the unlikliest and still best pairings the Series has come up with.

Interstingly, this album came out the same day as another fascinating effort - The Bad Plus' "Give", which, though more conventional, is still a sprawling and encompassing effort. With these two already out the door and Norah Jones' pop-jazz topping the charts with a vengence, it appears that 2004 just might be the year of jazz.

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