Little Simz and Ramsey Lewis

In 1973, the Ramsey Lewis Trio performed their arrangement of “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts on German television. This performance has been viewed an astonishing 1.6 million times on YouTube.

I learned that fact from Paul Thompson‘s analysis of the performance, which includes transcriptions of several of Cleveland Eaton’s basslines. Paul’s YouTube channel is one of the most valuable music education resources on the internet.

After I watched Paul’s video, I immediately downloaded the Ramsey Lewis Trio’s studio recording of “Summer Breeze” and warped it out in Ableton so I could listen with my producer ears.

The whole thing is delightful, but it shifts into a whole new level of funk after the piano solo. When I got to measure 94 (4:13 in the recording), I thought, oh man, that would make an incredible sample. I looped that bar and let it play. My wife was working in the other side of the apartment and asked me what I was listening to. I looked up “Summer Breeze” on WhoSampled and was delighted to discover that measure 94 was sampled in “Gorilla” by the great British emcee Little Simz, a track that I adore.

Here’s my chart of the “Gorilla” groove. The sample is a few BPM faster than the original Ramsey Lewis track, and it’s pitched a semitone higher.

Drummer Morris Jennings is playing one of the all-time great boom-bap grooves here. It’s all on eighth notes except for one kick drum on the sixteenth note subdivision before the “and” of three. That kick is important, because it’s the only one that communicates the groove’s sixteenth note swing. Is the offbeat kick delayed from beat three, or is it a pickup to the following kick which is itself delayed from beat three? Either way, the absence of a kick on beat three is a loud “accent” in and of itself.  Beat three is the second strongest beat in the bar after the downbeat, and you naively expect there to be a strong accent there. With no kick underneath it, the hi-hat on beat three feels like it hits that much harder. The other nuance of the beat that I love is that Morris Jennings hits the last two hi-hats on four and the “and” of four particularly hard. In the context of measure 94, it’s just a passing fill, but it takes on a whole new meaning when that bar is looped endlessly.

Now let’s look at Cleveland Eaton’s bassline. He starts with four eighth notes on F, A-flat, a two-note Ab chord, and a two-note Bb chord. This last chord hits on the “and” of three and sustains until Eaton hits a muted note on the sixteenth note subdivision before beat four. In the last beat of the bar, he plays a few sixteenth notes that are completely straight, which creates a nice friction against the underlying sixteenth note swing. I love an upright bass playing chords in a hip-hop sample.

What key is “Gorilla” in? In the Ramsey Lewis track, the sample comes from a repeated loop of E7 and A7, and the section is in E blues. You might think that the pitched-up sample would be in F, but it doesn’t feel like it to me. Normally the presence of F on the downbeat of a loop like this would be enough to tonicize it, but the Bb7 chord occupies most of the measure, and it feels like that chord is the bassline’s destination. Maybe the intro to “Gorilla” is more harmonically definitive? It’s a C power chord with its fifth raised to a sixth and then the regular C5, followed by Bbsus4 and Bb. The metrical placement of the C5 chord makes me hear it as the tonic, but you could also make the case that the intro is V and IV in F. The verses are really long, though, and eventually I lose track of whatever might have been happening in the intro. So I really hear the main groove as having dual tonicity, floating between F blues and B-flat Mixolydian. 

By the way, Little Simz is not the first rap artist to sample that specific bar of “Summer Breeze.” Jurassic 5 also used it for “Concrete Schoolyard” – listen at 4:07.

Also, speaking of “Summer Breeze”, the Isley Brothers recorded a pretty great cover of it, at an extraordinarily slow tempo. Their version gets sampled a lot.

The Main Ingredient also recorded a slow-tempo cover, and they added lots of cool arrangement touches like harp and vibraphone. Their version gets sampled a lot too.

Even Seals and Crofts’ original version has been sampled a bunch. Hip-hop producers love this tune!

Meanwhile, Ramsey Lewis has been a major source of iconic hip-hop samples: “Electric Relaxation” by A Tribe Called Quest, “Fu-Gee-La” and “How Many Mics” by the Fugees, “Sesame Street” by Goodie Mob, “Hope I Don’t Go Back” by E-40, “Officer” by the Pharcyde, “Case of the PTA” by Leaders of the New School, and many others. Lewis occupies a similar cultural position to Ahmad Jamal: jazz historians and critics don’t generally treat them as central figures, but if you look at jazz through a hip-hop lens, they take on major significance. I slept on them hard until I started looking up sample sources. I’m grateful to Paul Thompson for filling so many gaps in my groove education.