Classic Hip Hop Sample Chasing: Original Flavor Back to Roland Kirk
I first heard the instrumental for Original Flavor’s “Can I Get Open?” on Cut Chemist meets Shortkut - Live at the Future Primitive Sound Session. Two gifted cats with great ears absolutely destroying it on four turntables at a live show in The Bay.
“Can I Get Open?” released in 1994 and augured the ascendance of Roc-A-Fella. Jay-Z is on this track. Dame Dash also shows up later in the album. And group member and producer Ski headed right to Roc-A-Fella when Original Flavor disbanded.
But Jay-Z is the least interesting thing about this cut: I’m in love with the instrumental and its component sources. I found it on YouTube and play it more than the vocal version.
But as vocals go, I still love how it carries the energy of the era. One of my favorite features of the New York stuff from ’91 to about ’94 was the hyperactive crew rhyming typified by the famous “Scenario” track with A Tribe Called Quest and Leaders of the New School. I never tire of the playfulness and variety of the multi-mic counterpunches to the ends of a line: Ooohs, aaaahs, whoofs, and WHATs.
These verses were also a kind of sampling, too. You never knew when somebody was going to jam a piece of a ‘70s cartoon theme show or a commercial in the middle of a verse. In “Can I Get Open?”, you get references to Jaws and the Wizard of Oz included with the price of admission. (“Duh-nuh, duh-nuh, get out the water!”)
I had to look it up to spot it, but this track actually has a piece of mega-composer John Williams’ Jaws theme providing some of the bottom end. It also has a plucked-instrument melody — is it an upright bass or something else? I had to know where this one came from. It turned out to be the prelude to Roland Kirk’s 1969 album, Left & Right.
And this was how the broader magic of the solstice found me through the side door. Christmas commercials and nativity mangers are always trying to tell you what you should feel this time of year, but somewhere in the course of listening to this album, an expansive holiday joy found me — the kind you miss if you’re trying to shop or embarrassing yourself at the office holiday party.
Earlier in the evening I’d broken my three days of isolation to tip one with Donovan down at the Trinidad Lounge, where I caught up with him and had my first-ever taste of Malort. (ProTip: Try a nip of this Chicago staple back to back with a sip of a forgiving bourbon. Like the Tin Cup I had. It works.)
Donovan came back to the shack for a bit and I coached him through his first game of Resist!, or tried to: I forgot how quickly he gets a game when you set it in front of him. He charged his way to a win and down the dirt road he went in his Subaru, leaving me with a slight buzz and an overwhelming desire to chill out with one of my favorite instrumentals, which led to me, content and alone in the darkened living room, listening to the entirety of the LP that birthed the sample.
All of it. The guy seemed to have an instrument for every facet of his kaleidoscopic soul. The second track, “Expansions,” clocked in at over 19 minutes and I held on for the whole ride, wondering if God took this man’s vision away at age two so he could show you what sunlight on the trees looks like in a valley where clamorous parades of the dispossessed honk and wail all their suffering and joy like the culminating scene in some magical realist epic.
I’d never heard anything quite so alive. Listened to the rest of the album and woke up in the morning wondering if the divine keeper of the playlist hadn’t sent me my own Saxophone Jesus.
Go look at what I’m talking about and tell me you don’t feel something: His ability to do circular breathing and play multiple horns is sort of the hook that gets you to watch, but underneath is a composer’s mind that seems to take in every sense, every style of American music, every emotion, everything that channels wind from the lungs, and push it back out in something that sounds both acutely envisioned and totally serendipitous.
As a parting gift, here he is with his quintet in Bologna in 1973. Happy holidays, fellow explorers and lost-ark raiders.