Small Professor is a producer from Philadelphia who has been slowly building a following over the course of this year with his “Jawn” series of EPs. This is the fourth installment in the series, and as you can guess from the title, it’s a collection of songs without homes. The second installment, Elderly Jawns, was the most fully formed and far reaching effort, but that isn’t to say that Leftover Jawns doesn’t have it’s moments.

After a short Chappelle Show audio clip (“The chief is fuckin’ up!”), we jump into the music. While Professor doesn’t overdo it with the audio clips, I can’t say that this opening clip brings anything to the table. It’s not bad or overly distracting, and I enjoy Chappelle as much as anybody, but it just sounds out of place on the EP. He does a much better job using an audio clip on “and believe me baby pa, I got it all sewed up,” which opens with a quote from The Wire, in which Detective Lester Freeman states, “We’re building something here, Detective. We’re building it from scratch. And all the pieces matter.” This is the sort of clip that works nicely in the middle of an instrumental EP, as Small Professor continues to build new songs out of pre-existing samples. He then does a fantastic job of using a clip to set up “how it usually ends,” which take the comical Seinfeld line of “It’s not you - it’s me!” to introduce a sweet melancholic song that I can only imagine was written after a break up, with a minor key piano line being played on top of a string section and minimal drums. On this EP, Small Professor is reworking a lot of sixties and seventies soul samples, some of them obvious, some of them more obscure, but they all forge new identities. Professor has a really good sense of when to keep building on a motif, and when to be happy with an idea that plays out in a minute and a half.

For a collection of songs that were orphans, everything fits together rather well. It won’t blow you away, but Leftover Jawns is a solid and enjoyable collection of instrumental hip hop. I’ll be interested to see what Small Professor brings in his full length album due out next year.