Tony Wrafter & Michelle Pascal – Y Skate On Thin Ice
Label: Forever Groove Records – FGT 002
Format: Vinyl, 12"
Country: UK
Released: 1991
Genre: Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz
Style: Jazzy Hip-Hop, Contemporary Jazz
This piece was originally featured in the Hip Hop special of DIG – copies of the magazine can be purchased here.
Here's something you don't see very often. An early 90's UK Hip Hop track with elements of live Jazz. It's the sort of thing that you'd come to expect from the Acid Jazz scene that was just beginning to go mainstream, but here we have a 12" from 1991 on the Forever Groove label, the second of only two releases that the label put out, both in the same year, fusing the two genres.
I picked this up at a Bank Holiday Car Boot Sale a couple of years ago. There was a chap there selling JUST records which is always a pleasant surprise and I recognised him from the previous year’s Bank Holiday where I'd picked up a nice Level 42 12" (shut up, I like Level 42, OK?!)
"You bought a Level 42 record of me last year" he said to me as I was picking out some more Level 42, and this 12"... man this guy's good.
Recorded at The Coach House Studios in Bristol (at the same time Massive Attack were recording Blue Lines), Tony Wrafter – who plays sax and flute on the label's first release Une Amitie Africaine by Soul in Motion – recorded a couple of tracks for this release. The B-Side is an uptempo Jazz number called Skippin' Out which later inspired Roni Size's Brown Paper Bag (Double Bass over Breakbeat) and reached number 3 in Black Echoes Magazine's Jazz Chart and features the same piano as used on the Blue Lines LP.
Whilst in the studio, Michelle Pascal (now working in TV for the BBC) was rapping on a track called Planet Joy and once that track had finished the instrumental for Y Skate began playing and Michelle just kept on going. Label Boss Ian Pirrie liked it so much that he decided to put it out as the A-side.
Y Skate On Thin Ice (When You Can Dance) (the title of the track came from a fortune cookie) was conjured from beats by Nick Robbins (Reborn) and bass from Si John (Roni Size Reprezent). After they recorded the rap and sax, Geoff Barrow (Portishead) put down some scratches, then Tony mixed it all down with engineer Russell Kearney.
When talking about the aforementioned Planet Joy track with Tony, he went on to say "Although mixed and finished it was subsequently never released, unfortunately. I have in fact a whole album of unreleased material from that time! I live in hope that it may come out one day..."