REVIEW: Various Artists, Stolen Moments Red Hot + Cool (GRP)
- Scott Williams
To this date, the Red Hot Organization has sold over 2 million albums, raising over 5 million dollars to fight the AIDS epidemic. Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool is the group's latest release and contains 14 songs from some thirty highly regarded artists from the fields of jazz, funk, soul and hip-hop. Responding to the need for increasing awareness among people of color, a segment of the population especially hard hit by the disease, the album's choice of musical styles is particularly appropriate. These art forms emanate from the same cultures to which the benefit album attends, while simultaneously transcending nationality, gender, and generations.
At first glance, Stolen Moments appears to be another hip-hop/jazz mix like those offered by Guru, with his landmark Jazzmatazz Vol.I, or by Blue Note superstars, Us3. However, the majority of selections emphasize jazz music's intellectual compositions, going beyond mere backing instrumentation to weave a sensuous blanket of hopeful and energetic themes -precisely the stuff required to fight a disease like HIV. Such is Stolen Moments philosophy; the rapped lyrics telegraph hands-on messages of shared responsibility and the powers of positive thinking to raise awareness in a beleaguered community.
Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool more than showcases the talent within the vast circle of artists that compose its roster: Guru, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Digable Planets, Us3, Branford Marsalis, and more. From the Pharcyde crew's intelligent humor on "The Rubbers Song" to the magnificently delivered rage/soul in "This is Madness" (The Last Poets with Pharoah Sanders), the album is conceptually right and ideologically sound. Artistically and philosophically, this is the standard for others to follow.
