mp3: STADE reverse charge blues (feat. infinite livez)
here’s a little cut of screwed hiphop blues courtesy of stade, aka improv-headz pierre aud√©tat and christophe calpini. ripped from their new long player, ‘tactile sessions’, ‘reverse charge blues’ features a suitably off-kilter blues vocal refrain from big dada’s infinite livez, the bethnal green mc behind 2004’s ‘bush meat’. elsewhere on the album, wayne paul (lotek hi-fi) furthers the dada connection, whilst horn-genius eric truffaz lends his lips to the melee. digging through stade’s official home at stademusic.com, the genesis of ‘tactile sessions’ is revealed as a 2005 precursor ‘tactile’ – the ‘sessions’ collection is a remastered and “updated” version, primed for wider distro across the universe thanks to german label kitty-yo.
in recent times, jazz and hip-hop have often overlapped (mo wax’s mid-90s excursions spring to mind, although the beastie boys current jazz odyssey/oddity also warrants a mention), but i can recall fewer recent blues hiphop crossovers (set me straight via the comments link pls). i’m not referring to the blues inferences and influences in artists such as the roots or common, but more direct communions as evidenced here.
in his article, ‘hip hop and blues‘, elijah wald makes a well-cited direct connection between the two genres, going so far as to describe hip hop as “the living blues” – citing an “obvious line that runs from robert johnson or tampa red through louis jordan, muddy waters, bo diddley, on to james brown, kurtis blow and ice cube”. how this then extends through to two white boys from deepest switzerland demands a large flip chart, a dozen marker pens and about a week and a half of your time and mine. start the project by checking the kitty-yo music player and stream the album.
infinite livez features on seven of the ‘tactile session’s twelve tracks which near-as-dammit makes it a full collaboration. but if that still isn’t enough for you, stade and livez have also collaborated, in the 100% sense, on a new big dada release, ‘art brut fe do yoot‘, an as-live improvised studio recording recorded in stade’s swiss studios.