Ezra Collective trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi is the most recent artist to pay homage to jazz legend Chet Baker as a part of the forthcoming Chet Baker Re:Imagined tribute album, as his model of “Converse Low” lately launched. Initially composed by Kurt Weill — a composer who was largely identified for his stage works, which embrace “Mack the Knife” — in 1943 for a Broadway musical titled One Contact of Venus, “Converse Low” turned a jazz normal within the following years. It’s been lined by vocal artists like Billie Vacation and Tony Bennett to genre-bending creatives like Eumir Deodato and jazz icons just like the trio of Sonny Clark, Donald Byrd and John Coltrane. Nonetheless, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan carried out one among its most well-known iterations, and it’s that iteration that Ogunjobi is placing his spin on for Chet Baker Re:Imagined.
Clocking in at slightly below 4 and a half minutes, Ogunjobi’s iteration of “Converse Low” infuses the monitor with a number of of his personal influences, from the percussive Afrobeat rhythms that may be present in his work with Ezra Collective, his distinctive, soulful but triumphant tone on the trumpet and the teachings he discovered from listening to Baker’s music when he started enjoying jazz.
“I got here throughout Chet Baker in my early years once I was studying the trumpet and jazz music, and his music spoke to me,” Ogunjobi says. “I believed it was actually soulful, actually sincere. The whole lot from his trumpet enjoying to his singing was relatable, and I feel that’s one thing I took from his music and his enjoying — to be who you might be and to say it plainly if you sing or play.”
Stream Ife Ogunjobi’s tackle “Converse Low” now, and anticipate Chet Baker Re:Imagined, that includes fifteen tribute tracks from everybody from Ogunjobi to Benny Sings and Poppy Daniels to the touch down on April 11.
