Madlib Medicine Show Volume 8 - Advanced Jazz

High Jazz, the previously released Madlib Medicine Show album, showed a marked development in Madlib's craft: every element of jazz was encapsulated in that eighty-minute opus. What better way to follow such an album than with a companion-piece culled from the thousands of jazz albums that inspired Madlib's first forays into the genre? The resulting mix, Advanced Jazz, is, as the title hints, a step (or three!) deeper than the Steve Kuhn and Weldon Irvine albums that he first enjoyed as he was first delving into his Yesterdays New Quintet project Angles Without Edges in 2001. Some of this music – to the untrained ear – might not seem to be “jazz” at all. But rest assured – this is a jazz mix through and through, as exhilarating a ride as Madlib’s Brain Wreck Show and Flight To Brazil. It’s a celebration of this great American music and while it focuses on the past forty years, it clearly heralds every innovation – both domestic and international - of this century-old musical form.