Artist: Various Artists
Title: Verve//Remixed
Label: Verve
Website: ververemixed.com

Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" has always been a disturbing song. Even on an aesthetic level, the song is dark & sinister, sung by Holiday as if she were channeling an ancient griot. Lyrically, its depiction of lynched bodies hanging from Poplar trees is enough to induce nausea in anyone with an imagination. Of course, singing this song, Holiday discovered not only stardom, but found power and strength through its graphic lyrics and her brave performance (see bell hooks' Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics)...

So, with a song as controversial and emotionally-loaded as this, what should be the goal of the artist doing a remix? Should they attempt to make it into something that, "has a nice beat and you can dance to", inserting a euro-trash house beat and creating a dance-floor anthem? Or should they provide a new context in which to view the original work, keeping Holiday's spirit but providing alternative settings for her classic phrasing and depiction of Southern racism? Indeed, its even valid to ask if a work such as this should even be touched by a some eager DJ with more technology than they know what to do with...

Fortunately, the kids at Verve have decided that some of today's top DJ's and mixologists should have access to this and eleven other classic jazz cuts from the Verve vaults, and they have made the latter choice, providing not obnoxious dance-floor anthems but a new context in which to view these jazz classics. The demonic Tricky adds film-score horns and random synthesizer eruptions to Holiday's "Strange Fruit" to craft a track that, while lacking the original's pop sensibilities, captures the true eeriness of the lyric. Other highlights include Rae & Christian's playful take on "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby," performed originally by Dinah Washington, and De-Phazz's gorgeous new setting for Ella Fitzgerald's "Wait 'Till You See Him." The always-sublime Thievery Corporation have deconstructed Astrud Gilberto's "Who Needs Forever," creating an ethereal dub soundtrack to have out-of-body experiences to, and Holiday even turns up again, this time arriving at your favorite smoky New York after-hours club by way of India, courtesy of Dzihan & Kamien. Of course, the purists are all up in arms about this release, feeling that some of the sacred altars of Jazz have now been permanently desecrated, but as long as the mixes being done are of such high quality, this writer has no problem with it. Besides, Jazz has always been a carnivorous style of music, consistently swallowing and incorporating new musical and intellectual trains of thought, so it seems only fitting that artists who are on the cutting edge of electronica and acid-jazz are now reinterpreting and, in essence, performing the tracks that have inspired them for so long.

Columbia allowed Bill Laswell access to Miles Davis' studio out-takes, and Blue Note has been releasing the "Blue Breaks/Bossa/etc" series for a while now, so it seems not only appropriate but about time that Verve opened up their vaults to the electronica community.
If you do have issues with this, though, you can get all of these songs in all of their original pristine beauty on the Verve Unmixed CD, which this writer also highly recommends, but don't ignore the Verve//Remixed CD--its well worth your $$$.