Gap Mangione – Diana In The Autumn Wind

Glorified alternately as a holy grail or a white whale for hip-hop sample heads, Diana In The Autumn Wind has now received its very first reissue. J Dilla and Madlib fans can happily play sample bingo with this 1968 album, but A Tribe Called Quest, Ghostface Killah, Kendrick Lamar, Talib Kweli and many others have drawn from it too. Bible here, Moby Dick there – the real question is: does this almost cultishly revered Gap Mangione work also convince as a coherent jazz-funk album?

Short answer: yes, absolutely. With Gap Mangione on electric piano and organ, the rhythm section of Tony Levin on bass and Steve Gadd on drums forms a very young – all in their early to mid-twenties – fiery and virtuosic trio of capable jazz musicians. On top of that, Gap’s brother Chuck conjured brass and string arrangements influenced by classical music and big-band jazz as much as by Brazilian pop and rock. That the Mangione brothers were no purists, and were quite engaged with contemporary pop music, is shown by the piano-heavy cover of »Yesterday«, which a then presumably hip British group called The Beatles had released only three years earlier. Whether crisp jazz standards, the closing »Graduate Medley« of »Scarborough Fair«, »The Sounds of Silence« and »Mrs. Robinson«, or the apparently still unsampled »Pond With Swans«, they make one thing crystal clear: Diana In The Autumn Wind can also be enjoyed wonderfully from start to finish.