Jeff Purtle

"If the voice don't say it, the guitar will play it," raps Saffron on "Pork-U-Pine," the third track on Jeff Beck's minimally titled Jeff. And he does. Beck teams with producer Andy Wright, the man responsible for his more complete immersion into electronic backdrops on his last outing, You Had It Coming. This time the transition is complete. Beck used electronica first on Who Else!, moved a little more into the fire on You Had It Coming, and here merges his full-on Beck-Ola guitar heaviness with the sounds of contemporary spazz-out big beats and noise.

The alluring voices of Tassis Christoyannis and Véronique Gens immerse the listener in the atmosphere of the nineteenth-century Parisian salons and the mélodies performed there. The composer and organist César Franck, famed for his instrumental music, proves himself equally skilled in setting poems by Musset, Hugo, Chateaubriand, Daudet and Dumas. This first complete recording of his works for voice and piano ranges over his entire creative life.