Dead Prez & Jean-Pierre Rampal – A serendipitous sample discovery

While listening to the following recording this morning I immediately thought to myself “I know that melody” . . .

Jean-Pierre Rampal & Lily Laskine performing Kojo no Tsuki

Now check out Dead Prez performing Behind Enemy Lines

I looked at the liner notes of Dead Prez’s album let’s get free and couldn’t find any mention of the sample or its source. So, I am not sure of the actual sample source or whether it was manipulated during production, but an enjoyable discovery nonetheless. (I also searched around on Spotify for a bit to figure out if I could hear a recording that might be the sample source but couldn’t find one that matched–though this other Jean-Pierre Rampal recording with Ensemble Lunaire has a fuller sound).

I’ve always enjoyed exploring the ways that samples and musical borrowing work in music and think that it is a topic worth exploring in diverse types of music education settings. I discuss some similar issues in relation to forensic musicology and analysis in my article From Musical Detectives to DJs: Expanding Aural Skills and Analysis Through Engaging Popular Music and Culture.

If you’re new to the notion of sample-based music, I highly recommend Joe Schloss’s Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Music Culture) (which was recently published as the 2nd edition).