"Sampling is about testing your ability to take old records and make an [audio] collage"

Music with a Past (and a Future)

Fusion cooking is about blending flavors and cooking styles; fantasy baseball works on a similar principle, creating the best possible combination of players from different teams. So what's the musical equivalent? Sampling, a process which involves taking parts from one song and using them to make a new one.

Joseph Schloss is an ethno-musicology at Tufts.

"With sampling, you can take two artists that never played together and make them play together."

"With sampling, you can take two artists that never played together and make them play together," says Joseph Schloss, 37, a professor of ethno-musicology at Tufts University and author of Making Beats: The Art of Sample-based Hip-Hop. "Take a sample of Miles Davis and have him play with James Brown. They never played together, but I often wonder what it would sound like if they did."

Sampling took off in the early 1980s, following the example of The Sugarhill Gang, who, in 1979, incorporated the band Chic's song "Good Times" into their song "Rapper's Delight." ("Good Times" was also later sampled in songs by numerous other artists, including Blondie, De La Soul, and DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince.) Songs made by the original sampling artist, The Sugarhill Gang, have since been sampled by others as well, creating a constantly evolving musical conversation. An attempt to graphically explain the system of lending and influencing that's taken place in the history of sampling can be seen in the "projects" section of designer Jesse Kriss's site. Kriss shows how even songs by the likes of 1950s' artists Eddie Fisher and Charles Mingus found new life in recent rock tunes.

"In terms of popular music, sampling is definitely at its height right now," says Schloss. He attributes this to ever-improving technology, which makes it easier for amateurs to learn how to mix old recordings without needing professional equipment. While music purists might argue that sampling is more copycatting than it is genuine art, fans of the form say its genius lies in what you're able to find and what you're able to do with it.

"A lot of people think musicians that sample aren't able to play an instrument. Many are, but they'll choose not to. There's this feeling of, 'Well, anybody can just play something on an instrument; what's hard is finding a record that has the sound you want.' When you sample a record that no one else has sampled, it's the equivalent of figuring out a very complex figure on a guitar or violin."

Remember, there is an art behind the madness; it won't do to combine just any random selection of samples. Says Schloss: "Sampling is about testing yourself and testing your ability to take old records and make an [audio] collage that's something new and beautiful."

Posted on July 24, 2006