_Amazon.com Review:
Those who caught French trumpeter Erik Truffaz's 2000 release, The Mask--a forward-looking mélange of Miles Davis-influenced cool jazz and acoustic drum & bass grooves--will no doubt want to hear Truffaz's latest concoction, Revisité. Like The Mask, Revisité is culled from several albums Truffaz and his quartet released in France in the early '90s: Out of a Dream, The Dawn, and Bending New Corners. But unlike The Mask, which was a compilation of tunes from those albums, Revisité contains seven new remixes that push the original tracks into some impressively varied and innovative terrain. Using mostly the original acoustic performances and blanketing them in a wall of electronic sound, the remixes interestingly play up the electronic aspect of Truffaz's tunes without sacrificing the acoustic balance and interplay of the originals. Alex Gopher's "Bending New Corners" is straight-up drum & bass, while Goo's remix of "Siegfried" sounds like early '90's acid jazz, and Mobile in Motion's trip-hop flavored "The Dawn (Part 2)" would have sounded at home on the first Portishead album. Pierre Henry's take on "More," on the other hand, looks even further back, to Miles Davis's "Great Expectations" from the 1974 album Get Up with It in its extended, spacey melody and use of ambient electronic sounds. It's a testament to Truffaz's original material though, that even when the remixes sound a bit dated, they still put a fresh spin on what was already some very visionary music. --Ezra Gale
_AMG Review (3):
The seven tracks on Revisité are "remixes" of tunes that Erik Truffaz, the adventurous French trumpeter, previously explored with his jazz quartet. In a bid to crosspollinate jazz with new sounds being explored in ambient and electronica, Truffaz enlists the talents of six guest artists to reinterpret his work through their own experimental points of view. Like Truffaz himself, these musical seekers hail from Europe — Pierre Audétat, Alex Gopher, Pierre Henry, Goo, and Bugge Wesseltoft, as well as Mobile in Motion (Christophe Calpini and Fred Hashadourian), which splits "The Dawn" into two parts that respectively open and close the album. There's a mellow, even minimalistic vibe to much of the music, with the possible exception of Alex Gopher's party-worthy "Bending New Corners." Truffaz's sparse trumpet work over these electronic loops and grooves does, of course, recall Miles Davis, but what's interesting about this record, and others like it, is that it signifies a new direction in music — not a throwback to fusion, not a concession to commercial pressures, but a fecund meeting of some very different yet complementary musical minds. Wesseltoft's dark blend of Rhodes, acoustic bass, drum samples, and rap vocal snippets on "Sweet Mercy" represents a new kind of musical mosaic, an idea with a very promising future. — David R. Adler |
