Country: France
Artist: Male solo artist
Career: recording since 1994, 2nd album
Language: Instrumental
Genre: Jazz / House
The recipe is straightforward: loop a good backbeat to infinity and let an array of great soloists on different instruments loose on them. Who needs a theme or a melody, let’s groove. And so we get, in sequence, ‘Rose rouge’ (sampled voice and trumpet), ‘Montego bay spleen’ (Ernest Ranglin on guitar), ‘So flute’ (flute and piano), ‘Land of…’ (organ), ‘Latin note’ (percussion), ‘Sure thing’ (John Lee Hooker), and so on. Each track is a different shade of the same formula, an upgrade of ‘70s soul jazz in its most smoothly danceable form.
Make no mistake, for the first 6 tracks and 40 minutes, it works to perfection. Yeah, it’s unthreatening, it’s kinda glossy, you could put it on a coffee table, but it’s so good. There’s a reason ‘Sure thing’ (built up out of samples of Miles Davis and John Lee Hooker) was inescapable that year on the continent. Why is it great? The soloists. With nothing in the way of ‘song’ to restrain them, they let go on a deep groove, building ever longer, unwinding lines, carving out a way through the jungle. I’d guess Ludovic Navarre (who is St. Germain) edited the solos out of longer/multiple takes, building something with more direction and intent than your average one take solo would guarantee, always accentuating melody in the improvisations, melody the players didn’t always know was there, I bet.
The last third of the record drifts out of the window. He runs out of new instruments, and needs to fall back on variations and combinations (flute and saxophone,…). He also runs out of memorable backbeats, and it sort of meanders on – some nice flute on ‘La goutte d’or’ though. Quality control isn’t all that, but so what, he got the sequencing right – I’m grading this on the first 40 minutes.
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