Sure, many of the tunes are fast and jumping, but their propulsion is largely thanks to Fitzgerald's heightened sense of play. The dates caught on this box aren't regarded as the greatest for either of the marquee artists, but in terms of the sheer quality of music and their fullness of vision, Fitzgerald's tunes vie with anything else she did in her career. Vocally, she's both tight and loose, brimming with turns of phrase and belting lyrics with popping exactness. Fitzgerald sounds mightily driven, sometimes almost boundary breaking in her execution. Then there are the Ella Fitzgerald sets, which are possibly the better portion here. It's awesome to hear him and the band, banter and all. And then there's the eighth CD, which presents a band rehearsal with Ellington doing what drove some mad: humming sections to instruct the band, calling out key changes quickly and sounding altogether like a practitioner of an oral tradition in musical pedagogy. What's great is the ability to really dig in to the band, hear it work, set after set, on the tunes and the polyphonic interplay of the ensemble's sections. This is some fairly standard Ellington for the era, with hard-flying solos from Paul Gonsalves and myriad others. The Ellington tunes show his orchestra in long form, taking multiple sets (with some tune repetition across the CDs) and thriving in Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's tightly scripted ensemble sections. The peephole, though, looks in on the fluorescent jewel cases, each of which faithfully reproduces fantastic Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald sets from July 1966 at France's Cote d'Azur. This eight-CD set is a sleek affair, packaged in a plain-Jane, silver-ribbed box with just a peephole in the center. The group were signed to the label shortly after. The pair assembled a few tracks in Wherry's tiny studio, which they subsequently passed to Ninja Tune bosses Matt Black and Jonathan More (aka Coldcut) in a club. A bass player in acid jazz/funk group the Propheteers, Wherry met local DJ Teeba in South London, where they both lived. Formed by Ollie Teeba and Jake Wherry in the early '90s, Herbaliser, unlike many of London's abstract beat scene's acid house-steeped big-name artists, trace their roots to American jazz and funk (Roy Ayers, Johnny Pate, Ramsey Lewis) as well as old-school hip-hop (particularly of the New York variety - Grandmixer D.ST, Sugarhill, Jungle Brothers). Combining deft, mid-tempo beats, well-chosen jazz and funk figures, sparse scratching, and even the odd rap, Herbaliser bridge the gap between dusty B-side instrumental hip-hop and London's new school of psychotropic beat scientists. The Herbaliser are one of the more purely hip-hop oriented acts on Ninja Tune's roster of sample-based pocket-funk. With 'Care' we're strongly reminded of Shackleton's overcast temperament and rhythmic contours while the final title track evokes images of Scorn-like doom-dub dystopia. 'Screwby' follows, circulating tribal steppers rhythms around marshy subs and banshee screaming atmospherics and 'Combed' lulls us with music box melodies and ghostly string sashays, something like the Caretaker doing a dubstep waltz with Zoviet*France. The first shock of Cameron Reed aka Babe Rainbow's sound comes on the sludgy 'Popcommon' sounding like the Substance remix of Monolake's 'Alaska' mixed with Russell Haswell in warm-up mode. It would appear that the reverberations of dubstep have reached the shores of British Columbia as a muffled clang, rusted with industrial detritus and encrypted with ritualistic tribal percussion. Canada's Babe Rainbow makes a bold debut entrance on Warp with the apocalyptic mine-steppin' sound of the 'Shaved EP'.
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