Viewed through the prism of the past two decades, Curtis Mayfield has been celebrated as a hip-hop prophet, largely because of his Superfly blaxploitation soundtrack of smooth funk grooves and ghetto poetics. But the late Chicago soul pioneer's relevance extends far beyond hip-hop, as this atypically reverent remix album reminds. Louie Vega bumps up the tempo and beats of "Superfly" via newly recorded guitar, bass, brass, flute and percussion parts that take the 1972 anthem on a jazzy club excursion. Grandmaster Flash misfires with his remix of "We're a Winner," cheapening the Impressions' 1968 black-pride epic with tinny Eighties rhythms. The set's surprise knockout is King Britt's hallucinatory version of "Little Child Runnin' Wild." Shot through with dense, spiraling layers of slo-mo acid guitars and booming dub bass, the track now suggests twenty-first-century Jimi Hendrix as it re-imagines Mayfield's 1972 original through a junkie's blown mind. It's a killer.

“He Will Break Your Heart”

A lightly swinging Latin-influenced, almost cha-cha groove and close harmonies decorated Jerry Butler's early soul hit "He Will Break Your Heart," delivering a stately warning that his rival would never love his girl like he did. The melody came to Butler as he was driving on the highway from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Philadelphia with Curtis Mayfield, and as Butler told Rolling Stone, "I just sang the melody and Curtis put the chords to it." The song's premise, Butler added, "was something that I'd lived ...The lyric was an experience rather than a revelation. Whereas music is usually a revelation."