Search - Mike Ladd :: Negrophilia: The Album

Revelatory

Troy Collins | Lancaster, PA United States | 07/27/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Negrophilia" is Thirsty Ear's latest entry from its acclaimed Blue Series. Documenting the fertile land between the divergent camps of Jazz, Hip-Hop and Rock, the Blue Series has produced a number of masterful collaborative albums. "Antipop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp," DJ Spooky's "Optometry" and El-P's "High Water Mark" all present innovative combinations of live Jazz improvisation and electronic processing with a Hip-Hop base. Mike Ladd's "Negrophilia," featuring a stellar band and a fruitful concept, is no exception.



Using Petrine Archer-Straw's book of the same name about Parisians' fascination with black culture during the 1920s as a launching point rather than a strict interpretation, Ladd invokes the text to riff on race relations then and now. Live musicians collaborate over a dense bed of loops, samples and cut and paste production techniques. Coming off like EL-P behind the mixing board, Ladd's vocals are more akin to spoken word artists like Carl Hancock Rux than typical underground rappers, although occasional pitch shifting reminds one of Quasimoto. Ladd only contributes vocals to half the album, yet the literary concept remains solid with vocal samples providing the balance of the text.



Ladd has a crack band at his disposal. Tape loops and samples (courtesy of Bruce Grant and Marguerite Ladd respectively) play an integral role in the albums overall structure, but there is just as much live improvisation as there is programming and mixing.



Featuring the endlessly inventive drumming of Guillermo Brown and the varied keyboard stylings of Vijay Iyer, Ladd has also enlisted the multifarious talents of Roy Campbell on trumpet and Andrew Lamb on a number of reeds, from tenor sax to bassoon. Filled with ecstatic interweaving horn lines from Campbell's trumpet and Lamb's tenor sax, Ladd also regularly overdubs his fellow conspirators, such as the meandering bassoon loop that anchors "Back At Ya." Iyer gets in some introspective pianism on "Sam and Millie Dine Out" and "Nancy and Carl Go Christmas Shopping." Brown plays his Hip-Hop influenced rhythms tight, but never rigid, always allowing room for elastic counterpoint or inventive call and response. Ladd's production embodies bass loops, pitch bended synthesizer wig-outs and other distorted effects. "Finale" is the album's climactic conclusion with overlapping vocals, layered electronic processing and unidentifiable samples. Culminating in a sound collage that sounds like the modern missing link to Rahsaan Roland Kirk's more surreal early 1970's experiments, Ladd has established a historical continuum for his work. The stew is mighty thick at points, but never overdone.



Floating effortlessly from raw Hip-Hop beats and Free Jazz blow-outs to thick Funk and electronic mayhem to introspective, Chamber-Music like Minimalism, "Negrophilia" skirts the line between the overwrought and sublime. Occasionally elliptical in away that avoids casual interpretation, it never sounds anything less than inspired."