About three years ago, I suddenly found myself in possession of a couple of albums’ worth of Scandinavian nu jazz, and it was fantastic. The slightly exotic, rarefied mixture of chilled off-kilter beats, jazzy piano and double bass, and the subtle electronic flourishes represented something new and different from my usual oeuvre, and I ate up all I could find—even though some of it skewed closer to the less interesting, duller forms of jazz you might find scanning through the radio in the early evenings.

A couple of months ago I was again looking for a way out of the musical malaise. So of course I turned to the last avenue of relief I had pursued, and found a whole whackload of nu jazz compilations. Only after listening to a bunch of them did I come to realize my folly: like all things, if you just download a bunch of random compilations and hope you get all the good stuff, you’ll be sorely disappointed. I also discovered that the line between the adventurous nu jazz I sought out and the lounge-compilation jazz like you might find at a Starbucks was mighty fine indeed, and that I’d too often strayed into the latter territory. Meanwhile I’ve yet to find much that matches the coolness of a Iony or a Jaga Jazzist.

But while down in the nu jazz trenches, I picked up some rare groove and cratedigging compilations as well, just because they happen to sometimes fall into the same categories. Thanks to prior experience with their On Track series (which I hadn’t paid much attention to until recently), I remembered to grab the first Off Track compilation from Kon and Amir, a duo that can be best described as having a much better record collection than practically everyone on the planet. The On Track releases were long mixes of great samples and loops from obscure vinyl cuts; the Off Track series expands those samples into full songs, allowing people to hear the original material.

Because Kon and Amir specialize in unearthing quality funk, soul and dance tracks no one else has thought to mine for sampling material, most of the stuff on the first Off Track album is probably unknown to you; I certainly don’t have a clue who anyone is on the disc, including Homebrew. What I do know, however, is that “Once I Had a Friend” is a great track with a killer chorus. It makes me want to play the trumpet, rock the bass, and belt out “whooo-oooh-oooh baby!” at inopportune moments, it’s that great. It’s also a great reminder of my recent trip to NYC (not surprising, as each album in the Off Track series is named after one of the five boroughs). There’s a bunch of great funk, soul and jazz tracks on the two-disc set—Le Stim’s “Tribute to Muhammed Ali” is another great one—but the laid-back, easy groove of “Once I Had a Friend” is by far my favourite.