| High Water came about when a bunch of incredibly talented individuals sat in a room and shared their thoughts and ideas musically. The fact that the producer, El-P, comes from the world of indie hip-hop and the players are free jazz musicians matters little. The result is a forest of sounds and ideas, the collaboration between these ostensibly disparate musical forces revealing an underlying connection in the form of the basic language of music. Having the extremely good fortune of being able to do this with the Blue Series Continuum (Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Steve Swell, Roy Campbell and Guillermo E.Brown) makes the record all the more exciting and special. This is not a record of El-P remixing jazz tracks. This is about him taking the role of producer in the context of a jazz recording, giving the players compositions, themes and subtle direction to work with, letting them do what they do best, and then bringing the resulting sonics into his laboratory, processing, reconfiguring and refracting them, finally to emerge with this unique, progressive, respectful and ultimately triumphant expression of his musical ideas.
I'm grateful to have been able to collaborate with such amazing musicians. I brought in compositions that the players of the Blue Series improvised to. I then took the results and reworked them into structured songs. There is only one guest appearance on the record...my father Harry Meline, or Harry Keys as he goes by when performing. The album is for him. - EL-P |