Home
sign up| features / music interview |
 content by: editor |
 keepintime interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Hear the drummer, get wicked. “Rhythm, the drum, is the most immediate thing. If I was to put a great drum track on now, you would respond to it, no matter what.” Brian Cross, aka B+, is explaining the motivation for a project that has united hip-hop DJs and producers with the great jazz sticksmen whose work they have been cutting up and sampling all their professional careers. Keepintime began as a photoshoot, threw in some live shows featuring drummers and DJs duetting with each other, and has now developed into an album, some five years after its inception and almost ten since the Irish-born photographer first pitched the idea to an unresponsive industry. Drummers: Palmer, Humphfrey and Porter, the DJ live line-up “People would ask me what records they were on, have they got anything coming out,” he recalls. “Come on! What records aren’t they on? Between the four of them they cover American music from 1945 to the present.” Of the four drummers (Earl Palmer, Roy Porter, Paul Humphrey and James Gadson), it’s the latter two who feature most heavily, and their initial encounter with the men (such as Dilated Peoples’ Babu and J-Rocc of Beat Junkies) who dismember their work was not without its culture-clash tensions, particularly from Humphrey, who’s still unhappy that Jimmy Smith copped the sample clearance fee when Beastie Boys sampled his beats on Root Down. “They had attitudes that anybody of that generation would think about hip-hop, mostly negative,” admits Cross. “But sooner or later you get these people together and there’s a lot more that joins them than separates them.” The final stage of Cross’s baby (although a Latin version, Brazilintime, is forthcoming) is the Keepintime album, with producers Oh No, Quantic, Cut Chemist and more remixing the scratch-n-drum live shows, including the mercurial DJ Shadow, who oversaw the music for the accompanying DVD and contributes two tracks to the album.  B + and his famous cover for DJ Shadow Shadow’s connections with Cross go back to his Endtroducing album, the downtempo classic for which the photographer did the famed artwork. Although he has also designed albums by Jurassic 5, Mos Def and the new Damian Marley LP, the blurred record shop photo remains his most celebrated, even though it was, it transpires, a happy accident caused by an interloping cat. “We measured the focus really quickly because of the cat and we measured in feet when it’s set for metres. That’s why the foreground is out of focus. It was honestly a total mistake.”
Steve Yates
 conversations
Read members' comments.
|
 |
related info
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
music  music archive Watch music sessions and interviews from 2002 to 2008. books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
useful links
access 1000s of articles