… or, at least, for fans of the piano samples.
Cam’s 1996 Substances opens with a sample from Gang Starr’s “Mass Appeal”, and proceeds through a range of faux-Mid-Eastern stylings, toned-down drum ‘n’ bass moments and Interview With A Vampire excerpts.
But it’s the jazz piano samples that dominate the album.
More specifically, it’s the sound of Herbie Hancock and Mccoy Tyner adapting the idioms of bebop piano to the restless development of Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis and — in the case of Tyner — John Coltrane.
“Friends and Enemies”, the opening track, is built around a wistful McCoy Tyner introduction. A range of samples follow throughout the album, all pervaded by an air of autumnal melancholy. They are often cut across the beat so that the soft drumwork is brought to the front like light rain.
There’s a tendency to underestimate the importance of Hancock and Tyner in Davis’ mid-sixties quintet and Coltrane’s quartet. Certainly the firebrand drummers — Tony Williams and Elvin Jones — have always received a great deal of attention, as has Ron Carter’s amazing prolificacy. Richard Cook and Brian Morton have suggested that, by the mid-sixties, Hancock “may also, as McCoy Tyner was to do at almost exactly the same time, have realized that he was to some extent external to the real drama of this extraordinary music.”
But it’s hard to fault the artistic approaches taken by either pianist. Tyner’s willowy romanticism is the perfect foil to Coltrane’s sometimes impatient — and logically exhaustive — bluster. Hancock’s wide, open voicings create the perfect space for Davis’ quick probings, not to mention Shorter’s angular melodies and feather-light nostalgia. The crispness of Hancock’s timing offsets the tendency of both Shorter and Davis to whimsical meandering, and unerringly finds the kinks in the meter that provide a bridge between Carter and William on the one hand, Davis and Shorter on the other.
What’s more, the feeling that Hancock could be “diffident and detached” (as Cook and Morton put it) is exactly the feeling of disconnect that lends itself to the emotional piquancy of the jazz of this period.
There’s more to it than that, of course. While the compositions became ever more sparse and mercurial, Hancock and Tyner were obliged to provide a harmonic outline, and therefore to remain to some extent within a traditional bebop vocabulary. With the piano recorded in pristine accuracy at the front of the mix, the result is some of the essential restlessness (and glittering isolation) that inhabits this music.