David Axelrod: Rescued from the record bins

Discerning hip-hop artists love to sample David Axelrod. Now he's sampling himself. Ben Thompson on a new future for music's past

The cover of DJ Shadow's 1996 album Endtroducing... is a photo of some record shoppers intently rifling through the vinyl racks, their earnest endeavours benignly overseen by a slightly out-of-focus cat. If that blurry feline could talk, the speech bubble coming out of its mouth would read roughly as follows: "Do not mock the anal-retentiveness of Mr Shadow and his vinyl junkie friends. In five years' time you will not only have cause to thank them for two of the funkiest records of 2001, but also to marvel at the way their tireless enthusiasm has brought the music they love full circle."

While it's generally best to be wary of musicologists who eat their food from a saucer, in this instance the cat is right on the money. The albums in question are David Axelrod (the unfeasibly dynamic Mo'Wax recording debut by the 70-year-old Los Angeles producer/arranger of the same name) and Discern/Define by booty-shaking German rare-groove troupe The Poets Of Rhythm. As well as being fine releases in their own right, they also represent a fascinating new turn in hip-hop history.

On many pioneering rap records (for example, the first releases on Sylvia Robinson's Sugarhill label) the Sixties and Seventies funk rhythms that DJs had cut and pasted so dexterously were reproduced by live players. With the dawning of the electro era, live instruments quickly gave way to machines, but then – as technology grew more sophisticated – the sampler's ever more exact reproduction of organic bass and drum sounds sparked a renewed interest in live instrumentation.

From the Fugees' heroically ham-fisted pub-rock medleys of old electro favourites, to the legendary jazz bass-player Ron Carter guesting on A Tribe Called Quest albums, the outgrowths of this back-to-basics tendency were many and various. But when the original musicians who had produced the raw materials for sampling were brought back into the loop, a combination of transgenerational reverence and rampant decontextualisation all too often produced results that were starkly at odds with hip-hop's modernist agenda.

In the case of David Axelrod – the maverick producer and arranger whose late Sixties heyday had already proved fertile soil for sample-farmers from Dr Dre to Lauryn Hill – things have gone very differently. The boss of Mo'Wax records, James Lavelle, first tracked him down– "almost as a dare" – to re-score Thom Yorke's "Rabbit In Your Headlights" for 1998's U.N.K.L.E. collaboration Psyence Fiction with the U.N.K.L.E participant and fellow Axelrod buff DJ Shadow.

After that Lavelle wanted to get Axelrod back in the studio to reanimate a half-century-long recording career. He was well aware of the dangers this presented. "My greatest fear was what I call 'the jazzmatazz scenario'," Lavelle says. "When great producers and artists from the past try to make new records, they tend to go about it the wrong way. Rather than trying to bring people 'up to date' you need to focus on whatever it was that person did which still makes them sound contemporary. I wanted a record that contained the same feeling as the music David was making in the late Sixties – the drums, the strings, the fact that the music seemed to be already made up of breakbeats long before anyone knew what they were – otherwise there wouldn't really be any point."

Hence Lavelle's enthusiasm when Axelrod told him about a recently unearthed acetate of unused rhythm tracks originally intended for a (tragically!) never-to-be-realised Electric Prunes concept album based on Goethe's Faust. (If this sounds outlandish, perhaps the timely reissues of Axelrod's visionary tone poems based on William Blake's Songs Of Innocence and Experience will make things a little clearer.) Almost as if sampling himself, Axelrod went back into the same Capitol B studio in which the originals had been recorded, with the same crack troupe of session musicians, added some new strings together with two extraordinary new vocal tracks to open and close the album.

"The idea of a rapper coming in terrified me," Lavelle admits, but the result – a gripping, apocalyptic anthem for doomed youth, written by Axelrod but delivered with impressive conviction by the 21st-century LA rapper Ras Kass – brooks no argument. The tumescent strings, uproarious rhythm section and rigorously-drilled horn playing of the instrumental tracks that follow give you just the time you need to get your breath back before the album's finale – a raw and moving elegy to the drug-related death of Axelrod's son Scott, featuring the mesmerisingly wracked voice of old soul compadre Lou Rawls – leaves you with a thrilling sense of continuity between past and present.

The idea of Axelrod re-titling instrumental tracks he wrote 30 years ago ("The Dr and The Diamond", for example, pays tribute to the rap producers – Dre and Diamond – whose sampling exploits have kept his lawyer and accountant busy) and presenting them as a commentary on the years in between is about as in tune with hip-hop's founding principles of temporal dislocation and entrepreneurial resourcefulness as it is possible to get. But the story of the cheesewire-taut Munich-based funk troupe The Poets of Rhythm runs it close.

Coming across what sounded like a classic rare-groove single in a New Orleans record store, the West Coast rapper Tom Shimura, aka Lyrics Born (who used to rub shoulders with DJ Shadow in the Solesides stable, and is now a big wheel with Quannum Projects) naturally assumed it to be the work of an obscure Seventies US funk act, only to find that it had actually been made just a couple of years before. And by a group of beat-perfect Germans, who had taught themselves the entire history of pre-hip-hop US black music by tracking down the records mentioned in rap sample credits.

Shimura repaid the compliment by sampling The Poets of Rhythm himself, and then completed the circle of life by using the band as a backing outfit on his solo album, and helping them arrange a record deal for the miraculously supple and sinuous Discern/Define. "It just describes how the way we develop our music is in two parts," says the guitarist Jan Weissenfeldt of the album's aptly metaphysical title. "First we really study what other people do, then we establish our own style."

'Discern/Define' (Ninjatune/ Quannum Projects) and 'David Axelrod' (Mo'Wax) are out now