f all the jazz labels in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Impulse! was right up there with Verve and Blue Note in terms of importance and reputation. Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Dizzy Gillespie are just four of the titans who recorded for Impulse! Predictably, as has been done with the catalogs of Blue Note (The New Groove: The Blue Note Remix Project, Vol. 1 came out a full decade ago) and Verve (now on a third volume of their Verve Remixed series), a selection of DJ’s, mixers and producers has been given free reign to play in the Impulse! vaults for Impulsive!: Revolutionary Jazz Reworked. With the likes of RZA, Prefuse 73, and Kid Koala on the decks, you’d expect at least some of the results to be impressive, and those expectations would be rewarded.

Prefuse 73’s take on Gabor Szabo’s “Mizrab” certainly falls into the “impressive” category, as Scott Herren uses electronics to mimic and mirror Szabo’s lovely jazz guitar picking, while still propping it up against a head-nodding beat. You can hear who Herren is on this mix, as it’s sprinkled with various electronic squirts and squelches straight from his lab, but crucially he never overdoes it.

Szabo’s fairly unknown outside a certain jazz fraternity; the same can’t be said, however, for Mingus, Sanders, or Gillespie, which is one of Impulsive!’s greatest assets: source material. That said, you’ve gotta be able to pair great songs with great remixers to end up with a great remix project. A fine example is that of the previously unknown (to me) Gerardo Frisina, who does a fine job with the title track from Gillespie’s 1967 album Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac. Frisina gooses the song’s Afro-Cuban feel with an even more hip-shaking beat—it wouldn’t be out of line to call this nearly Brazilian—to go with his tastily chopped-up vocal and trumpet tracks. (They’re not screwed, sadly—really, wouldn’t Dizzy sound amazing given the Michael Watts treatment?)

Not everything here is sterling. SA-RA unfortunately spotlight Jon Hendricks’ annoying vocals from George Russell’s “A Helluva Town” and then add an entirely out-of-place squelchy bassline, ending up with something a step (or three) too far from the original, and not in a new-and-improved way, either. Chico O’Farrill and Clark Terry’s “Spanish Rice,” as remade by DJ Dolores, just sounds needlessly and uninterestingly rearranged (though to be fair, the original’s not a favorite of mine).

The less-than-great remixes are in the minority here, however. Blackalicious’ Chief Xcel wisely doesn’t tamper too much with Archie Shepp’s “Attica Blues,” mainly just adding a perfectly matched thump underneath it and stretching out the song’s tension (the song refers to the 1971 Attica prison riot). The end result is something updated just enough for today’s everything-old-is-new-again remix culture, and finely so. And the mighty RZA plays up the dissonance of Mingus’ “II B.S.,” making it more angular and hard.

The best remixes tend to do one of two things, either accenting a song’s finest moments and helping them to blossom, or taking the song in a completely different direction. Most of the new takes on Impulsive! fall into the former category, but enough do so well enough to give this album a higher rate of success—much higher, frankly—than most of its contemporaries. Considering the number of gems yet to be toyed with in the label’s vaults, and the number of DJs you know would love to get their mitts on ‘em, one could certainly expect a second volume of Impulsive!; based on the quality of this collection, here’s hoping the possibility becomes reality.