Turbula
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Music

Remixes a hit or miss affair

Reviewed October 2007

Billie Holiday: Remixed and Reimagined
Billie Holiday: Remixed and Reimagined
By Billie Holiday and various artists

Columbia/Legacy: 2007

To hear sound clips or learn more about this release, Turbula recommends viewing its Amazon.com entry.



Nina Simone: Remixed and Reimagined
Nina Simone: Remixed and Reimagined
By Nina Simone and various artists

Sony/Legacy: 2007

To hear sound clips or learn more about this release, Turbula recommends viewing its Amazon.com entry.

Two recent releases from the Legacy vaults that take classic jazz/soul master tapes and hand them over to mixologists for an updating show that the whole remix thing can be very much a matter of hit or miss.

The Billie Holiday set falls a bit flatter than the Nina Simone outing – due in no small part to the fact that Simone was a far more contemporary singer than Holiday. Whereas Holiday began her career in the 1930s during the Big Band era, and came to her greatest fame as an oh-so-cool jazz singer in the '50s, Simone began her career as Holiday was dying and even scored a soul hit in the '70s, her own "Young, Gifted & Black." And so Simone's source material simply lends itself more readily to the hip hop beats than does Holiday's.

Simone's cover of "The Look of Love" is particularly well-done, giving it a nice dance groove over a house beat.

Holiday's very singing style, on the other hand, is ill-suited for an eletronica/techno approach. Unfortunately, that reality didn't stop the remixers from having their go at her recordings. The vast majority of what's here has a disjointed, out of sorts feel to it. The reworking of "Summertime" strips away the haunting emotional realism of her original and turns it into a cold, robotic bit of chill.

If Sony is going to forge ahead with this series, here's hoping they find producers willing to say "no" when efforts clearly aren't working.

Review by Jim Trageser. Jim is a writer and editor living in Escondido, Calif., and was a contributor to the "Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD" (1993) and "The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues" (2005).



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