To mark the tenth anniversary of I’m New Here’s release, XL Recordings will release a unique reimagining of the album by the acclaimed Chicago-based musician Makaya McCraven, whose work Russell first discovered after hearing McCraven’s “Above & Beyond,” from 2017’s Highly Rare album. Equally renowned and revered as a musician, drummer, sampler, beat-maker and producer, McCraven is widely regarded as one of the most exciting and original voices in modern jazz via a run of records that were at once genre-defying and redefining such as Universal Beings, Highly Rare and Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON mixtape) for the highly influential Chicago label International Anthem. As the New York Times states: “Makaya McCraven has quietly become one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality.”
On We’re New Again – recorded and produced in the main at his Chicago home studio with a host of close-knit musicians – McCraven fuses the kind of killer, improvised live musicianship and electronic, sample-based approach to recording he’s renowned for with that vocal – the deep, stop-you-in-your–tracks, worldly-wise voice of Gil Scott-Heron – to enormously powerful effect. The resulting record is a sonically rich, totally original yet deeply respectful accompanying piece to Scott-Heron and Russell’s original work and is the latest stage in the evolution of a record that was previously remixed by Jamie xx in 2011 for the ground-breaking collaborative album We’re New Here.
We’re New Again track list:
- Special Tribute (Broken Home pt.1)
- I’m New Here
- Running
- Blessed Parents
- New York is Killing Me
- The Patch (Broken Home pt.2)
- People of The Light
- Being Blessed
- Where Did the Night Go
- Lily Scott (Broken Home pt.3)
- I’ll Take Care of You
- I’ve Been Me
- This Can’t Be Real.
- Piano Player
- The Crutch
- Guided (Broken Home pt.4)
- Certain Bad Things
- Me and the Devil
https://xlrecordings.com/
https://gilscottheron.net/
