Us3 ft. Rahsaan & Gerard Presencer – Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)

The story

Us3 got their record deal by getting caught. In 1991 London producers Geoff Wilkinson and Mel Simpson put out a single built on a Grant Green sample that Blue Note had never licensed to them, and Blue Note threatened to sue. Wilkinson talked the label into a better idea: let him record for them and raid the vaults legally. Boss Bruce Lundvall said yes, as long as Wilkinson proved himself with demos first. Even the band name came out of the catalog – Us Three, a 1960 Horace Parlan album produced by Blue Note founder Alfred Lion.

Cantaloop started as one of those demos in 1992. It's built on Herbie Hancock's Cantaloupe Island from 1964, with trumpet by Gerard Presencer and raps by Rahsaan, and it opens with Pee Wee Marquette welcoming the crowd at Birdland, lifted from a 1954 Art Blakey live record. Old jazz and new hip-hop shaking hands. Hancock met the group a few times and was complimentary, and Wilkinson believes the sample gave Cantaloupe Island a boost on its way to becoming a jazz standard.

Charles Wittenmeier directed the video. Once Capitol pushed it again in October 1993 it went everywhere: MTV's Buzz Bin, Yo! MTV Raps, BET, VH1. It won Best New Artist Dance Clip at the 1994 Billboard Music Video Awards. The single hit number nine on the Hot 100 and went gold, and Hand on the Torch became, by uDiscover's count, the first album in Blue Note's history to go platinum. A lawsuit threat turned into a platinum record. Jazz has a sense of humor.