Sometimes, Marshall Chess says, he had to summon the spirits of Leonard and Phil Chess to get to the heart of a track. The songs aren’t covers, per se, but they show their inspirational source material by copying titles of Chess blues classics: “Nine Below Zero,” “Smokestack Lightning,” “Goin Down Slow.” New Moves contains no actual Howlin’ Wolf vocals, Muddy Waters guitar solos or Little Walter harp riffs, but LeBlanc’s Chess Project crew surrounded Fowler’s moans and murmurs with blasts of electric guitars and harmonicas so they capture the vibe of what happened so many years ago at Chess in Chicago. In the zoom, Chess wears a red hat with CZYZ in white letters.) Owned by Marshall and Jamar Chess, CZYZ will retain the album masters, and BMG will oversee the publishing. (This is a reference to the Chess family’s original name in Poland before Leonard and his brother, Phil, immigrated to Chicago and changed it to something more American. New Moves, starring LeBlanc on drums, Skip “Little Axe” McDonald on guitar and longtime Rolling Stones backup singer Bernard Fowler on vocals, will come out sometime this year under a new label, CZYZ Records. “I took a couple tracks and put some live drums on it, and realized, ‘This sounds really good.’ So I called Marshall, and said, ‘Let’s just do a whole other album using a different slant on it.'”īMG kindly returned the rights to the album to Chess - for free. We let it go,” LeBlanc, the heart of The Chess Project, says by phone from his home studio in Meriden, Conn. “Then,” Chess says, “I collapsed.”Ĭhess wound up undergoing two spinal surgeries and was recovering on his couch in Phoenicia, N.Y., when the COVID-19 pandemic kicked in, forcing BMG, and all the labels and publishers, to close their offices. Chess approached BMG to administer the deal, and they hammered out the details, from the marketing budget to the launch party. Instead of using the Muddy and Etta samples, they turned the tracks into quasi-covers, modern interpretations of blues songs from the ’50s and ’60s. Over time, Chess and collaborator Keith LeBlanc – the experimental hip-hop drummer who’d been in Sugar Hill’s house band – adjusted their idea. “He’s still there.”(A UMG spokesperson declined to comment.) “I don’t know if I should say who got mad about it,” Chess recalls. execs found out, according to Chess, they “squelched” the project 2008’s U.K.-only album Chess Moves quickly fell out of print and is only available on eBay. (Grainge, of course, went on to take over UMG as its chairman and CEO.) But when the L.A. and pulling top international exec Lucian Grainge out of a meeting to give his blessing. To achieve this, Chess needed permission from publishers to use samples of Wolf and Muddy and the others from his family label – which Leonard and his brother, Phil, had sold to indie label GRT in 1969.Įventually, Universal Music Group took over Chess’ catalog, and Chess could not convince the major label’s Los Angeles executives to approve the samples - he even tried an end-run, traveling to the U.K. The tale of New Moves begins in the late 2000s, when Chess and some musician friends who’d worked at hip-hop label Sugar Hill Records in the ’70s and ’80s wanted to make an album of classic blues samples mixed with drum machines and contemporary electronic music.
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