I impulsively purchased Dizzy Gillespie's Sweet Soul: Live because I was attracted to its budget rainbow graphics, Marvin Gaye-esque song titles like "Dirty Dude" and "Get to That," and the $4.99 price tag. Tearing off the wrapping, my already modest expectations were further lowered by the enigmatic liner notes, or rather, a lack thereof: the reverse side of the cover was blank. Miles Davis' cacophonous funk experiment On the Corner lacked band credits before its "Columbia Jazz Masterpiece" re-release, but at least it had those Corky McCoy graphics and an agenda ("Miles for President" instead of "Dirty Dude").

It took me about five seconds of Sweet Soul's ersatz sound to abandon comparison to Miles Davis-- or Dizzy Gillespie, for that matter. As the bleary and decidedly sub-Dizzy trumpet solos of "Slew Foot" and "Soul Mama" whined over vapid, looping electronic rhythms, I felt cheated by some sound engineer who'd hastily tossed together some Dizzy outtakes with stock synthesized funk beats. But as my old gaffer is fond of saying, patience is a virtue.

Maybe the polite, simulated applause had a discreet hypnotic effect, because as "Azure Blue" began, my resentment and befuddlement drained away. Its uncanny resemblance to the Sandals' seminally saccharine "Endless Summer" theme made me realize that I wasn't listening to Dizzy Gillespie, or even jazz music at all. Willingly suspending judgment, I eased into "Azure Blue," and was transported to the fantastical land of camp, the funhouse frontier between bubblegum pop culture and more severe, intellectual terrain.

Defensetrate your jazz pretensions! Listening to Sweet Soul is comparable to taking in the first half-hour of Shaft in Africa. Whereas On the Corner was complex in the traditional sense of the word, Sweet Soul is complex in a more mathematical sense: as the lacanian phallus is the square root of negative 1, Sweet Soul's relationship to Dizzy Gillespie is nearly imaginary.

Like my secret penchant for egg chairs and shag carpeting, my listening pleasure is fueled by a quasi-facetious nostalgia for a funky, hedonistic time that never was. Moreover, unlike listening to ABBA, for example, Sweet Soul lacks the complimenting photographs, music videos, VH-1 specials, and retro clothing. Instead, the music pimp-struts over the speakers as a disembodied sound, dangling from "Dizzy Gillespie" only by its grainy illustration and specious title, and just enough so that it may overcome its insipidness, making it oddly hip. The album liner best represents the music's context: a small, rectangular carte blanche. Concluding with the ululating Femme-bot chorus of "Rutabaga Pie," Sweet Soul is a funky slice of jazzploitation well worth its bargain-bin price.

-Brendan Lanctot