‘Antiquity’: Jamie xx names the greatest jazz album you’ve never heard
Jamie xx might be best known for his house and electro styles, but much of his work is also informed by and infused with his love of old and rare soul, jazz, funk, and disco records. Over the years, he has used samples to enhance his songs and to shine a light on records he loves, augmenting his sound with fragments and pieces of the past and making them into something new and original.
He has a real knack for unearthing a hidden gem or revitalising a much-loved classic with a well-chosen and well-placed sample, so it was no wonder that he was ready to contribute to the NMEs list of ‘100 cult albums to hear before you die’ when asked in 2018, or that he would make such a left-field pick.
Fresh from the last leg of his ‘I See You’ tour with The xx, Jamie xx’s contribution to the cult-classics list was the obscure 1974 Jackie Mclean and Michael Carvin jazz record, Antiquity.
Opening with ‘The Tob’, a song which features a Sonny Rollins style saxophone and blistering drum rhythms which barely let up or let you draw a breath throughout, the album is a strange and meandering exploration of time signatures and tempos, rhythms and percussion and more. The second song, ‘The Hump’, is a six-minute trip around the world which combines far Eastern flutes with African drumming rhythms and South American samba whistles. From there, the album flits and switches between all of these sounds, combining worldier elements with that more expected saxophone sound.
Jamie xx said that the album is “quite innovative” before elaborating: “It has rhythms that could still be played out now in the dance clubs. I would describe it as kind of experimental jazz. It’s great for samples, there’s a lot of percussion and space in it, and there’s a lot of weird African vocal chanting, and then there’s also some great heavy drum riffs that sound like they could be sampled in UK garage.”
And it might not be surprising to hear xx himself turn to a track from Antiquity for a sample in one of his own songs one day. He has drawn on funk and soul from the era before, sampling Lyn Collins’ 1972 James Brown produced ‘Think About It’ in ‘Gosh’ from 2015’s In Colour, and on the same album, brilliantly building his best song ‘Loud Places’ around a sample from Idris Muhammad’s divine 1977 disco track, ‘Could Heaven Ever Be Like This?’.
More recently, Jamie xx has returned to the 1970s to collect more samples, which he incorporated in his most recent album, In Waves. Drawing on the disco bliss of Almeta Lattimore’s ‘Oh My Love’, or the retro-futurist funk of Revolicion’s ‘The House of the Rising Sun + Revelacion Suite’ and even the spoken word poetry of Nikki Giovanni, In Waves – like In Colour before it – is almost as much a musical collage as it is an album of new material.
And while Jamie xx hasn’t yet reached for anything from Jackie Mclean and Michael Carvin’s Antiquity for a sample, a couple of other artists have. Parts of their song ‘De I Comahlee Ah’ turned up in Jurassic 5’s ‘Swing Set’ as well as in Peter Kruder’s ‘Root Down’, both of which were released in 2000.
