Bay Blue (Bay Blue)

Chronique

For a while there, around the turn of the millennium, you could've built a small fortress (or at least a swanky bachelor pad) out of all the jazzy, sample-based cut-up records filling record bins, from French house types like DJ Cam and St. Germain to Madlib's Yesterdays New Quintet, plus what seemed like half of the Ninja Tune stable (Mr. Scruff, DJ Food). But it's not an aesthetic or approach that was getting much play a decade later, which is partly why Bay Blue -- the eponymous debut of Oakland-based producer Matt Chang (who previously provided beats for Sole and Pedestrian, and collaborated with Sixtoo under the moniker Matth) -- is such a refreshing delight. Essentially doing for jazz what Ninja Tune's Kid Koala did for the blues on his similarly time-out-of-joint 2012 release, 12 Bit Blues, Chang carefully constructs wholly new compositions out of untold dozens of samples. And while his hip-hop background shines through on occasion with a touch of sly boom-bap, the focus is squarely on instrumental interplay, which is organic and improvisatory enough (in feeling, at least) that Bay Blue can be classified as a "proper" jazz record about as easily as it can be called anything else. It's hardly beholden to any one era or style, spanning Frankensteined bebop ("Don't Clap on the One and the Three"), recombinant Dixieland ("Postcard from New Orleans"), and throwback Cuban jazz (the roiling "Ulises Takes the Silent Cinema by Storm"), along with the growling, Mingus-like "Take It Back Time" -- maybe the most impressive thing here -- and the musty, cinematic 78 rpm swing of "To the Cornerstore," which recalls early-period Daedelus at his dandiest. "Only a Sin If You Lose" tops a bossa groove with fluid guitar filigree and playfully mismatched vocal snippets cut-and-pasted into a light-hearted gambling blues, while the seemingly more straightforward vocal cut "Fish Fried, Birds Blue" welds some vaguely unsettling field recordings onto a straight-ahead country blues stomp, complete with wailing harp. And a few pieces deviate substantially from the general jazz/blues template, landing closer to the winsome, organic IDM of ISAN or Plone ("Bumpin' in a Quiet Way"; the banjo-led folk-hop of "Fundamentals"). It'd be easy for a record like this to succumb to formula or gimmickry, especially given Chang's somewhat tokenist approach ("the Latin one," "the New Orleans one," etc.), but there's enough evident craft and inventiveness on display here -- not to mention humor and charm -- that Bay Blue stands as far more than a retro-flavored bauble, the album's bland, unconvincing Blue Note-style cover art notwithstanding.

© K. Ross Hoffman /TiVo