Jazz musicians have always used contemporary pop music as raw material for their improvisations, and since the 1970s rock, soul, reggae and more have also been up for grabs.
The covers have been of individual compositions rather than whole albums, generally speaking, although in the late 1990s the Blue Note label got some of its artists to rework the music from some big hit LPs in its Cover Series.
Guitarist Charlie Hunter took on Bob Marley's Natty Dread, saxophonist Bob Belden tackled Carole King's Tapestry, and guitarist Fareed Haque chose Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Déjà Vu.
The results were mixed, but it was the sort of thing one expected latter-day Blue Note to do. Not so much the German ACT label, to which French-Vietnamese guitarist Nguyen Le was the first artist to be exclusively signed.
However, Le's latest release for the label, a collaborative project with arranger Michael Gibbs and the NDR Bigband, is entitled Celebrating Dark Side of the Moon. Le has chosen to record fusion jazz reinterpretations of all 10 tracks on the original Pink Floyd album, in some cases interspersed with new compositions extending the themes.
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the original album's release, and Le was the featured guitarist on a concert performance in Hamburg of an arrangement of the album by Gibbs, performed by the NDR Bigband. Three of those arrangements also feature here, but Le has reworked the other songs afresh himself.