Review, Danny Howells, Choice

The idea driving Azuli’s Choice series is interesting – ask a well-known DJ to compile and mix a collection of the tracks that are their own personal all-time favorites.  Danny Howell’s Choice includes two discs of music and a DVD (which I haven’t watched).  The set also has a booklet with an essay about Howells and a brief commentary on each track by Howells.

Howells arranged each of the two music discs as a continuous mix.  Disc 1 tends toward tracks that he used often in the early stages of his career and because of this, it hangs together pretty well as a dance mix.  Disc 2 is where things start to get a little squirrelly.  Howells includes tracks that have personal meaning for him outside the club interspersed with the more typical club-oriented tunes.  At one point we get one of those spoken/sung, poem/song, loungey/sound effect things from Japan (“Ghosts”) followed by 3.5 mins of the drum break from the live version of Iron Butterfly’s “In a Gadda Da Vida” followed by Howell’s remix of The Temptations “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone”.  This sounds like it ought to be a mess but Howells is so good at putting together a mix that he makes it work.  The transition from Iron Butterfly to The Temptation is especially sweet.  The set ends with a Carly Simon track.

As interesting as the idea behind Choice is, collections like this usually end up sounding like someone else’s mix tape – a collection of tracks that mean a lot to the person who put them together but just sound like a random collection of songs to everyone else.  While the nature of the project means Choice will speak more clearly to Howells than you or I, Howells great skill as a sequencer and mixer largely avoids the somebody-else’s-mix-tape problem.  As a result, we get a collection of tracks that’s mostly enjoyable, always interesting and unlike any other mix you’re likely to hear.