Jaimeo Brown's Work Songs (From the Archives)

The jazz drummer Jaimeo Brown formed his trio Transcendence back in 2013 – their first album, also called Transcendence, was built around samples of old southern singing married to an inventive mix of blues, jazz, and distant echoes of hip hop. Jaimeo Brown’s Transcendence released Work Songs in 2016, which takes more sampled sounds from America’s past and uses them as the template for a new series of songs. Actually, the samples extend well beyond the States this time, but the song “For Mama Lucy” has a clearly American sound: it’s built around a 1959 recording of an inmate at the Parchman Farm Prison in Mississippi, surrounded by some classic blues guitar from trio member Chris Sholar (Grammy-winning producer of Kanye West, Jay Z, and many others). It's a creative re-appropriation of a complicated cultural back-catalog, and the group stops performed in-studio for a taste of its insightful historical remixing. (From the Archives, 2016.)