Michel Baudin Histiv

Metamorphoses is another of those enormous productions by the French electronic music master. Offering a cycle of songs, Jarre and his platoon of keyboards - a wonderful meld of cutting-edge and vintage technologies - delve into the notion of change and evolution with a remarkable efficiency despite the plethora of guest vocalists and instrumentalists. His collaborations with Laurie Anderson ("Je me souviens") and Natacha Atlas ("C'est la Vie") are wonderfully successful. The former is a staggered sequencer-driven track whose pulse varies, throbs, and wanes as the vocals are articulated in syncopated fashion in alternating cadences. The latter is an Eastern-tinged house track, where elements of disco, breakbeat, and even jungle enter and leave the mix after leaving traces of themselves on what follows their articulation…

Although billed as a Jean Michel Jarre recording, Odyssey Through 02 is actually a remix project by various artists, each taking a cut or two from his groundbreaking Odyssey album. Perhaps the reason Jarre's name is on it as one of his own is because he had final say over the end result. Here, countryman DJ Cam, Loop Guru, Apollo 440, Hani, Resistance D, the Sunday Club, and Boodjie & Veronica take elements from the classic "Oxygene," and re-create it in three "phases" completely out of sync with the source material and out of context. In other words, track ten is first and done three different times by different artists and "Oxygene 8" is done four times! DJ Cam remixes "Oxygene 7" and it is the only time it appears here; he remains somewhat faithful to the source, though he warps its time/space continuum a bit…

First time on CD. Composed & Conduted by the legendary Legrand including his "Picasso Suite". This nostalgic coming-into-manhood fantasy features a gorgeous Oscar-winning score by Michel Legrand ("Yentl", "The Thomas Crown Affair"). Director Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird) evokes the period with double-dip ice cream cones, paddleball, saddle shoes, packages of Fels Naptha and the mist of memory in which the hero's thoughts are enwrapped. Herman Raucher's screenplay is a discerning and appreciative translation of one boy's trip along a trajectory of psychological and sexual change.

For several years, decades in fact, a lost gem issued originally not just in the US but in the UK as well (and our vinyl pressings were always much better than their US counterparts), on Chrysalis records who, for a while, had some very good material in this genre, for example the two Auracle albums (and wouldn't lots of us like to get those on CD). But finally it's now reappeared on CD and how very nice it is to be reacquainted with it in that format. Anyway, this album ~ his second, as far as I know ~ features a host of jazz luminaries of the day (Hancock, Erskine, Pastorius, Carlton, Ritenour, Gadd, etc.) and its only failing is its mildly raw upper registers, though thankfully there are no vocals to pollute the proceedings and Jaco Pastorius' electric bass work is of truly sterling calibre. On this album, if anywhere, you can hear why he was held in such very high esteem by his contemporaries.