The connections between hip hop and jazz are obviously pretty intense. There's a sort of incestual relationship there most voracious expressed through the Jazzmatazz recordings from Guru during the latter half of the '90s and into the new millennium. But while those discs sought to fully integrate the two genres - like the Roots, but not as adept - some players and musicians kept to their own genre while being able to influence both.

With that dichotomy, there's also the fact that the white portion of hip hop's audience wasn't (for the most part) privy to hearing the random assortment of smooth jazz and fusion coming from parent's stereos during the '70s. So the ability for a segment of the rap buying/listening audience, while able to appreciate sampled musics, might not be able to identify or even appreciate the source material as a whole. That's not good or bad, it just is.

I've found that no matter how many Gil Scott Heron records I get through, there's usually as much nonsense as groove. And that might be roughly the same for Weldon Irvine.

Even if Weldon, a pianist, composer and writer was able to churn out a string of well received jazz and funk discs during the early portion of the '70s, those ended up not just affecting jazz - Stanley Turrentine covered Weldon's "Sister Sanctified" - but hip hop as well through the use of samples. I mean if Boogie Down Productions uses your work as the basis for a track, you're made, to say the least.

But prior to that Weldon worked with Kenny Dorham, Joe Henderson and eventually led Nina Simone's ensemble, arranged her charts and handled some of the business of her career. Working with an overtly politicized singer during the '60s served, to a certain extent, to awaken Weldon's awareness. Of course, growing up during the '50s in a southern state probably made as big an impact as anything else. But out of his work with Simone, Weldon would go on to record under his own name.

The first half of the '70s found Weldon amidst a creative fervor, releasing an album a year from '72 through '76. And of course, while the quality and consistency of those records could be called into question, one's ability to pick out a loop, groove or break is pretty easy.

On his debut as a leader - the 1972 Liberated Brother - the pianist works between more traditional acoustic sounds and some out and out jazz funk. There, honestly, isn't anything absolutely stellar here. And as the electric tracks come off a bit better, the disc doesn't really get underway until "Mr. Clean," the discs fourth track. There're enough keyboard lines and funky drumming to get the song over. But the album closer is probably what Weldon is best known for. The aforementioned "Sister Sanctified," begins with a heavy electric keyboard line and moves into that well known melody. Honestly, though, the Turrentine version is a bit more satisfying and void of the cheese that ends up propelling this track and album.