As fellow editor Evan Flory-Barnes likes to point out from time to time when the difficult conversation of genre arises, many of the old jazz masters preferred not to speak of their work as “jazz”, opting instead for the simpler word “music”. It was a response to classical music snobbery. Hip-hop suffers a similar snobbery, despite enjoying wide popular appeal, just as big-band swing did in its day. Spekulation cleverly rebukes this snobbery with his newest work, “The Ellington Project”. His work is Music, definitively. Using samples from Ellington’s band and snippets of the Duke talking, Spekulation creates new songs that both explicitly and implicitly challenge and absorb the potential criticisms of the nay-sayer. As Ellington says, “It’s just gonna be music, and if it sounds good it’s gonna be good music, and if it doesn’t sound good, it’s not gonna be music.” Well, it sounds good. Here are three cuts from the EP, which is available at www.spekulationmusic.com for a price of your choosing.