Various Artists: Thirsty Ear Presents: Blue Series Sampler

There is and always has been something a bit off about the Blue Series. From the get-go, there’s the whole self-consciousness of the thing: “All right boys, your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to take elements of jazz, hip-hop, and electronic music, and fuse them into something that propels us into the stratosphere . . . and beyond!” Let me say, of course, that when bands or crews or scenes or individuals do this sort of thing, and do it well, I’m eagerly open-eared. But by naming the thing, the Blue Series both sterilizes the process and opens the door to an implicit hauteur that has no place in two out of three of the traditions that it draws from (and even in jazz, there was a time before Wynton Marsalis, before Jazz Studies majors, before Eric Nisenson’s murder of jazz). For similar reasons, I don’t like DJ Spooky, and I don’t like Bill Laswell — their academesque stances bleed into their sterile, conceptual music. I didn’t like most of the early Blue Series records, and I didn’t expect to like this sampler of its more recent offerings.

But as it turns out, I don’t hate it. There are large swathes that conform to my ideas about what’s wrong with the series – lifeless calisthenics from touted ‘fusionists’ like DJ Wally, Matthew Shipp, the aforementioned Spooky, and the Blue Series Continuum, a large group purveying electro-jazz. But there is also a plethora of excellent tracks from artists who blithely dismiss the idea of trying to do anything but what they do best, which for the most part happens to be unadulterated jazz. Kidd Jordan, Fred Anderson, and Tim Berne dish out heaping helpings of vibrant action jazz, with nary an electronic flourish or hip-hop break in sight. David Ware and William Parker lead predictably devastating and elliptical journeys, Ware’s slower and mysterious, Parker’s frantic and angular, both feeding off the deliriously great sound of old-fashioned violin. I’m not sure where these decidedly non-genre-bending artists fit into Thirsty Ear’s mission, but they bring to the Blue Series something much more important than an overarching conceptual unity — that is, excellent music.

Then, though, in defiance of my preconceptions, there are the tracks that actually seem to live up to the series’ promise. Anti-Pop Consortium, now tragically disbanded, started out as a spoken-word alliance, and released a little-heard record with DJ Vadim under the moniker the Isolationist that drew heavily on beatnik reserve and jazz/hip-hop fusion. They go back to that with “Monstro City”, which has Beans showcasing his word gift over congas and cool piano. It’s great, though a good deal of the dreaded Blue Series self-importance does rub off, and I would still recommend the Isolationist if you’re looking to bake your noodle in a less stodgy manner. This comp’s real revelation, though, is El-P’s all-instrumental “Sunrise Over Bklyn”, which has him writing the charts and the Blue Series Continuum improvising according to his direction. His contribution is crystal clear when you contrast “Bklyn”‘s enthralling, almost narrative development with the aimless meandering of the Continuum’s own “Mist”. “Bklyn” has an immensely cinematic feel, a slow unfolding that draws you in and slowly adds bits of emotional coloring — it’s jazz in execution, but in spirit it’s got everything in common with devastating, overpowering El-P cuts like “Stepfather Factory” or “Last Good Sleep”.

It’s uncertain whether El-P would have ever turned his hand to jazz composition without the opportunity offered by the Blue Series — the opportunity to produce something that can be clearly delineated from the main body of his work, freeing him to experiment. Anti-Pop took a similar approach to the record they contributed to the series, doing something daring and bold and very different from their usual output. If Thirsty Ear allows the Blue Series to serve this role more frequently, rather than reserving it as a playground for artists whose work already fit its narrow parameters, it could start paying real artistic dividends. Actually, if El’s forthcoming solo entry in the series lives up to anything like the standard of “Sunrise over Bklyn”, he will have single-handedly justified the entire experiment.