Us3 — Hand on the Torch (1993)

How two Londoners with keys to the Blue Note archive made the record that proved jazz and hip hop had always been the same conversation.

Blue Note Records. London.

作者：拉菲·默瑟

There is a moment near the start of Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia) where everything arrives at once.

A piano groove — Herbie Hancock's Cantaloupe Island, pressed to Blue Note vinyl in 1964 — rises out of the speakers. A trumpet enters above it. And then, over the top of both, a rapper scats a single improvised phrase — biddy biddy bop — and something clicks into place that no one had quite managed before. Jazz and hip hop, not side by side, not in polite conversation, but genuinely fused. Occupying the same room. Speaking the same language.

Hand on the Torch didn't happen in New York. It happened in London. That matters.

The Set Up

Geoff Wilkinson and Mel Simpson were not jazz musicians in the traditional sense. Wilkinson was a former concert promoter and jazz writer. Simpson a keyboardist. They had been making music together under various names since 1990, crate-digging their way through a city that had spent the previous decade being educated by Gilles Peterson — in Camden basement clubs, on pirate radio, in the acid jazz scene that had grown from a joke into a movement.

They started by breaking the law. An early release under the name NW1 on Ninja Tune illegally sampled Grant Green's Sookie Sookie from the Blue Note catalogue. Instead of a lawsuit, EMI called them in. Blue Note's parent company heard something in the music they couldn't ignore. And then they did something extraordinary — they gave Wilkinson and Simpson free access to the entire Blue Note archive. Every record Alfred Lion had ever produced. Unlimited. Legal.

The name they chose for the project announced what they intended to do with that access. Us3 — taken from a Horace Parlan album produced by Alfred Lion himself. They weren't raiding the catalogue as outsiders. They were positioning themselves as its inheritors. And then they went to work.

The Record

Hand on the Torch is built entirely on Blue Note samples. Every track. No other sources. The whole album is an archaeology — Wilkinson and Simpson moving through decades of the catalogue, lifting grooves, trumpet lines, piano figures, basslines, and then layering live musicians and MCs across the top of what they found.

The approach had a philosophical dimension that got lost in the noise around Cantaloop. This wasn't simply sample-flipping for effect. It was a statement about lineage — about the relationship between jazz and hip hop, about the way Black American music had always consumed and transformed itself, about the London that had grown up listening to both. The kissa tradition had taught Japan that serious listening was a discipline. The acid jazz scene had taught London that the Blue Note back catalogue was an inexhaustible resource. Us3 pulled both threads together and made something new.

The Herbie Hancock sample at the heart of Cantaloop is the most famous, but the album reaches further and deeper than that single track suggests. The grooves draw on Reuben Wilson, Lou Donaldson, Grant Green — corners of the catalogue that crate diggers loved and mainstream audiences had never encountered. Live musicians fill the spaces: saxophones, trumpet, trombone, guitar. The result sounds like a jazz session that has been visited by hip hop and come out the other side changed by the encounter — looser, more rhythmically grounded, more willing to repeat and hypnotise.

Rahsaan Kelly and Kobie Powell rap over these constructions with a lightness that suits the music. This isn't hard rap over sampled jazz. It's something more conversational — voices that understand the idiom they're working inside and respect its architecture enough not to demolish it.

What London Understood First

The record was slow to find its audience at home. Cantaloop didn't chart in the UK on first release. Japan heard it first — Swing Journal named Hand on the Torch Album of the Year, and the Independent named Wilkinson and Simpson Jazz Musicians of the Year in Britain. America followed. The single reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. Number nine. A jazz-rap record built on a 1964 Blue Note piano groove, made by two Londoners in a recording studio, reaching the US top ten.

It sold 2.3 million copies. Grammy nominated. And it became the first platinum album in Blue Note's fifty-four-year history. A label that had released Miles Davis, Coltrane, Monk, Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock. Fifty-four years. And the first platinum record came from London.

Jazz publications largely ignored it — the same critical instinct that had dismissed Black Byrd twenty years earlier, that had failed to hear what audiences were already telling them. But the connection between that critical blindness and this record is more than coincidence. The Byrd-era Blue Note records that the jazz establishment had dismissed as commercial sellouts in 1973 were now the exact records that a generation of samplers, crate-diggers, and listeners had built careers and movements around. Hand on the Torch was the explicit proof of that inheritance — the moment the argument became impossible to ignore.

Why It Belongs on a Listening Bar Turntable

This record does something unusual in the listening bar context. Most albums that sit well in those rooms — in Brilliant Corners, in Spiritland, in the jazz kissa rooms of Tokyo where this whole culture began — demand stillness. They ask you to arrive at their terms.

Hand on the Torch meets you halfway. It carries the weight of the jazz it's built from, but it moves at hip hop's rhythm. It rewards attention the way all the great Blue Note records do — there are decisions buried in the mix, relationships between sounds that only reveal themselves on repeated listening — but it also just feels good in a room in a way that some more austere records don't.

Put it on early in an evening, before the room has settled into its listening posture. Watch what happens. The groove arrives before the context does. People lean in. And then when the history behind it starts to become clear — Hancock's Cantaloupe Island underneath, two Londoners with keys to the archive above, the whole lineage of London's listening culture encoded in the way the samples sit against the live musicians — it becomes something richer than it first appeared.

That's the mark of a record built for repeat listening. It gives you something immediately. And then it keeps giving.

常见问题

What Blue Note records did Us3 sample on Hand on the Torch? The album drew from across the catalogue — most famously Herbie Hancock's Cantaloupe Island from 1964's Empyrean Isles for Cantaloop, but also Reuben Wilson, Lou Donaldson, and Grant Green among others. The entire album used Blue Note samples exclusively, with live musicians layered on top. For the Donald Byrd records that shaped the same cultural moment, the T&T album guide is the place to start.

Why was Hand on the Torch significant for Blue Note Records? It was the first platinum album in the label's fifty-four-year history — selling 2.3 million copies, Grammy nominated, and reaching number nine on the US Billboard Hot 100. A label that had defined modern jazz since 1939 got its first platinum record from two Londoners sampling its own back catalogue.

Where does Hand on the Torch fit in the story of London's listening culture? Directly at its centre. The acid jazz scene that grew from Gilles Peterson's Dingwalls residency in the mid-1980s created the audience and the cultural context that made Hand on the Torch possible. London had spent a decade learning to hear the Blue Note catalogue differently — and this record was the moment that education became visible to the rest of the world. The full story of London's listening bars traces the lineage from those acid jazz nights to the rooms that exist today.

拉菲·默瑟（Rafi Mercer）致力于书写那些音乐举足轻重的空间。如欲阅读更多《Tracks & Tales》的精彩内容，请订阅或点击此处。

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