Classics redone

The sound is classic, instantly recognizable to mainstream jazz fans. A slowly grooving, repeated piano phrase, an answering line from the bass, and a melody so infectious that it ultimately became a pop hit called “The Hucklebuck.”

The tune is “Now’s the Time,” played by the Charlie “Bird” Parker Quintet, and it arguably belongs in anyone’s list of the top 100 jazz recordings of all time.

But this version is not quite like the 1945 original. Something new has been added: random background sounds; a loopy-sounding voice. Most extraordinary of all, at the point where the inimitable Parker alto saxophone solo begins, we hear not Parker at all, but a soprano saxophone solo delivered over a growing roar of low electronics and turgid drum and bass sounds.

The Bird has been remixed. And not everybody thinks it’s a good idea.

“It always baffles me when nonmusicians or semiprofessionals take so much time tinkering with existing masters instead of expending the same energy creating original work,” says Bobby Colomby, co-founder of the group Blood, Sweat & Tears and a producer of everyone from Jaco Pastorius and Eddie Palmieri to the Jacksons. “It’s as if a child has broken into a recording studio’s control room, knocked out the engineer and producer, and proceeded to go berserk on the mixing console.”

The center of this controversy is “Bird Up,” which will be released Tuesday by the Savoy Jazz label. It features remixes of such familiar Parker efforts as “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” (by Meshell Ndegeocello), “Salt Peanuts” and a collection of other Parker classics (by Hal Willner’s group Whoops I’m an Indian), “Bird of Paradise” (by Serj Tankian) and “Steeplechase” (by Dan the Automator). Red Hawk is the remixer of “Now’s the Time.”

It’s not surprising that the remix phenomenon has arrived in the jazz genre. It’s long been standard practice in pop music, where remixed singles are routine, and acts ranging from Jennifer Lopez and Mariah Carey to Linkin Park and the Rolling Stones have released remixed albums and collections.

In its most rudimentary form, a remix simply involves taking the original multitrack tapes from a recording session and combining them in a different fashion. The process can transform a pastel-sounding album into bold primary musical colors; it can add a thunderous drum and bass groove to a voice and guitar; it can produce a shift in sound and texture comparable to what Phil Spector did when he added his trademark “wall of sound” to the Beatles’ acoustic version of “The Long and Winding Road.”

The remixing of familiar jazz numbers has been taking place since the ‘90s, with Bill Laswell’s reshaping of the music of Miles Davis on “Panthalassa,” one of the most prominent examples. But it was the Verve Group’s 2002 album, “Verve Remixed,” that established remixing as a potentially lucrative use of the jazz catalog. More than 350,000 units have been shipped internationally, and the follow-up release, “Verve Remixed 2,” is over 50,000 domestically in its first three weeks of release. (A live performance of “Verve Remixed 2” featuring remixers Mr. Scruff and DJ Spinna takes place Thursday in the Transistor Lounge at the Ivar Theatre.)

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‘Forward-thinking’

Matthew Backer, the producer of the Parker project, is reluctant to even use “remix” as a descriptive term for “Bird Up.”

“I think it really defies genre,” he says. “I wouldn’t call this a jazz record, and I’m very hesitant to call it a jazz remix record. It’s really an experimental, forward-thinking tribute. We certainly didn’t have in mind making Bird’s music more accessible to people. It was more about taking the spirit of what Bird stood for, digesting it, allowing it to become one with these artist-producers, and then going on a journey after experiencing what that feels like.”

That “journey” results in tracks that often go far afield from the originals. The production of “Constellation” by El-P, for example, retains virtually none of the original recording. And Willner’s rendering of “All the Things You Are” uses only the recording’s introductory phrase, overlaying it with Bird’s solo from “Out of Nowhere.” Other tracks include appearances by, among others, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, flutist Hubert Laws, bassist Ndegeocello and keyboardists Garth Hudson and Dr. John.

Some of the participants express similarly diverse perspectives, referring only indirectly to Backer’s “forward-thinking tribute.”

“I knew we would take a different look at Bird than some of the other remixers,” says Mowo, who worked with the Willner group. “We tend to not play it safely, but I also knew respecting Bird and his body of work was foremost in our minds as well.”

Tankian, who produced “Bird of Paradise,” is even more epigrammatic.

“I just really liked the flavors Bird had to offer us,” explains Tankian, who fronts the Los Angeles rock band System of a Down, “and he really lived those sounds. I wanted to make a whole song from that vibe.”

And Dan the Automator emphasizes his fascination with the material, as such.

“I took on the project because it allowed me to work with samples from an artist who I like. I find most sampling to be too expensive to clear, yet it is something I like to do and part of my musical palate that I wish not to forget. To have access to an artist like Parker made it special.”

Beyond Backer’s “tribute” idea, what are the other justifications for jazz remixing?

Some see it as an effort to keep the music alive by contemporizing it. They decry what they describe as efforts by the jazz police to hothouse jazz, to keep it in a museum, sacrosanct from attempts to recast it in ways not envisioned by the original creators. Some take the idealized view that the remixes are a way to bring younger audiences back to the classic original recordings. At the core, however -- as always in the record business -- the profit-and-loss bottom line may be most significant.

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Altering original works

Asked about the conceptual distinctions between his “Verve Remixed” CDs and Savoy’s “Bird Up,” Ron Goldstein, president and chief executive of the Verve Music Group, said, “The viewpoint has to be what marketplace you’re going after. In our case, it was electronic dance music, and we seem to have struck a chord with a lot of people outside, as well as inside, that genre.”

He is less sanguine about “Bird Up.”

“As far as the Parker album is concerned,” he continued, “I can imagine the feelings some people might be having about all this stuff going on with this precious historical product. It’s got to be a pretty lousy feeling. I think there are going to be more projects like this, but I don’t think this approach is going to have any kind of lengthy run, once the novelty effect wears off. And I’d be very surprised if this approach has the same kind of run we’ve had with our dance-oriented jazz remixes.”

Amid all the various arguments over jazz remixing, one fundamental fact cannot be overlooked. Remixing is a process that snips, slices, reframes and recasts an already fulfilled work of art by another artist. Analogies have been made to the sort of recomposition done by Gil Evans in his collaborations with Davis, or the orchestration done by, say, Ravel in his arrangement of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

But a more accurate comparison would be to someone who takes a painting such as Picasso’s “Guernica,” cuts it into pieces, combines the pieces with newly added bits and parts, and pastes it all together into an entirely different assemblage.

And that, according to Colomby, is a process too far removed from the very nature of jazz as a creative, conceptual art.

Referring to “Bird Live” he concludes: “As far as Bird himself is concerned, all I can say is that the phrase ‘He would turn over in his grave’ takes on new meaning. He would turn over in his grave all right, then dig himself out and seriously injure the people defiling his work.”

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Verve Remixed 2 Tour

Where: The Transistor Lounge at the Ivar Theatre, 1643 Ivar Blvd., Hollywood

When: Thursday, 10 p.m.

Price: $10-$20

Contact: (213) 840-7625