Jazz Remixed

Since more than 20 years Bob Baldwin is fostering music market with his premium performance. Collaborating with music stars of high caliber like Roberta Flack, Grover Washington, Tom Browne, Pieces of A Dream, Roy Ayers, George Benson, Marion Meadows, Chuck Loeb, Will Downing, Chieli Minucci, and Kim Waters, just to name a few, he has achieved the status of fame since a long time.

The fourth volume in Verve's Verve Remixed series was a long time in coming considering how quickly the label spit out the first three. Nonetheless, it is a welcome addition to that shelf if remixes are your personal thang. This set concentrates, once more, on vocalists, and the array is rather startling on the surface, though it's sequenced beautifully. As with any of these packages some cuts work better than others, but there are some true highlights here. Marlena Shaw's reading of Ashford & Simpson's "California Soul" is given a killer treatment by Diplo and Mad Decent, keeping the entire thing rooted in its source material and stretching it with judiciously added bits of early funk, Ramsey Lewis-style soul-jazz, and hip-hop…

This is the 10th anniversary edition of the monumental album that Snarky Puppy recorded in 2013 in a live studio format with an audience. It includes alternate takes of each song as well as the first recorded version of "Gretel," making it a must-have for fans.

Only six months after the third volume of Verve Remixed was released, Verve issued this, a box combining the three volumes of the series with an additional disc of extra remixes.
Though variously rooted in hip-hop, rave and dance clubs sensibilities, the art of mixology has evolved into a potent staple of contemporary pop music. That mainstreaming reached a new zenith with the release of the first installment of Verve Remixed in 2002 and continued to expand via two subsequent collections of eclectic Jazz/R&B-rooted remixes that found a growing, enthusiasitc audience at public radio and other adult-oriented radio outlets. This set compiles those three savory, largely Downtempo anthologies of Jazz-DJ Fusion, from the reworked takes on classic vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday that dominated the first set to the follow-up editions' more expansive palette…

One of the great blues albums of the early '80s, Classified captures the legendary New Orleans pianist James Booker not long before his premature death at the age of 43 on November 8, 1983. Recorded in a series of sometimes problematic sessions in 1982 – producer Scott Billington details them in his terrific liner notes on the 2013 reissue of the record, which is remixed and expanded – Classified appeared just a few months before Booker's death, so it's hard not to read it as something of a final statement.