Madlib: High Jazz - Medicine Show #7 (RSD Essentials/blue) LP

"Madlib follows Brain Wreck Show with the seventh installment in his Madlib Medicine Show, a jazz album with his Yesterday's 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. This year, he's already released two albums from 'spin-off bands' that he introduced on the 2007 Yesterday's New Quintet Yesterday's Universe album. And, with High Jazz, Madlib begins anew, offering familiar jazz sounds from a series of 'new' groups from his ever-augmenting cosmos. Call it 'Yesterday's 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 Yesterday's excursions are never easy to categorize and that's the point -- while experiencing chops like these, the desire to rigidly define takes a backseat to aural pleasure. The Madlib Medicine Show series is a combination of Madlib's new hip-hop productions, remixes, beat tapes, and jazz, as well as mixtapes of funk, soul, Brazilian, psych, jazz and other undefined forms of music from the Beat Konducta's 4-ton stack of vinyl."