Next month, the Seattle jazz drummer and bandleader Kassa Overall will release a new album called CREAM. It's a cool idea for an album: A collection of instrumental jazz versions of rap classics. Since so many of those rap classics are built on soul and jazz loops and ideas, there's an appealing circularity to that kind of thing. On CREAM, Kassa Overall and his bandmates take on tracks from people like a Tribe Called Quest, Outkast, and Juvenile. We've already posted the Overall version of Digable Planets' "Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat)," and now they've also shared the record's title track.
"C.R.E.A.M." -- get the money, dollar dollar bill y'all -- came out as a single in January 1994, and it was the breakout mainstream hit for the Wu-Tang Clan, the anarchic Staten Island collective who captured so many memories over the next few years. They grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side. You know it. If you don't know it, if you're encountering that song for the first time on this blog post, then I would like to meet you. You are a mystery to me, and I am fascinated.
In the new version of "C.R.E.A.M.," Kassa Overall and his bandmates expand on the melody of the original, which RZA pulled from a sample of the Charmel's "As Long As I've Got You." It works as a lonely meditation, a reflection of a foundational text. In a press release, Overall says, "Their whole energy was an alternative to the get-the-money-shiny-suit mentality. For me, the original 'C.R.E.A.M.' was a commentary on 'Get Money.' It was realism. It pointed out everyone's scrambling and striving to get ahead, but it also nodded at something beyond that. You could transcend and even control the material world through a higher divine nature." Below, check out Kassa Overall's version of "C.R.E.A.M.," as well as the original Wu-Tang video.
CREAM is out 9/12 on Warp.
