Tribute albums: love ’em hate ’em. It’s easy to be sniffy or better still indulgent about a tribute album. But there’s usually a strong sentiment at work that sways your reaction.
Usually it’s how you relate to the work being paid tribute to. But If the tribute is to something really iffy or the player paying tribute is – let's be tactful – unsuited to the task, then it's going to be a rollercoaster of a ride to put it mildly.
Let’s pretend we’re in 2040 and someone well-meaning decides in all sincerity and with historical revisionism having then swung well into his G-ness’ favour to do a tribute to Breathless, a Jeff Koons exhibition held concurrently obligatory.
If it ever happens it would turn jazz snobbery on its head: suddenly smooth-jazz after all those years of disdain and having become impossibly hard to track down, by then also spawning a dozen mutant mini-me genres and with massive kitsch appeal into the bargain, cultural hot property. Free jazz, by contrast, still waiting for a fresh reappraisal and languishing on 2040’s equivalent of Heart FM that bit too accessible after all the intervening years of approval.
‘The Joy of Life’, the first track of 1992’s Breathless, above