le Ritenour

French guitarist/producer U-Nam is again standing tall and looming large on the smooth jazz scene with another creative gem called C’est Le Funk. In addition to dazzling us with his graceful and funky instrumental work (and one funky delivery with vocals from Tim “TiO” Owens), the album is loaded with strong production and presence. Wasting no time putting the groove into high gear from the start, the guitarist leads off with a driving track called “Smoovin’,” continues plowing ahead with the party groover “Something’s Up” and strutting right through the super-funky, hook-rich title track which features Nivo Deux (Nivo Deux is actually a project organized by U-Nam and wife Shannon Kennedy focusing on the incorporation of 80’s Pop, Smooth Jazz, and Electro-Funk).

Nils Wülker has grown in the last twelve years to be one of the most successful jazz trumpeters and jazz composers in Europe. Born in Bonn in 1977, he was taking piano lessons at seven, switched to the classical trumpet when he was nine, finally discovered jazz at the age of sixteen on an exchange year in the USA and progressed via Us3’s smash hit “Cantaloop” and its original composer Herbie Hancock to Miles Davis. Back in Germany, he was picked in 1996 for North Rhine-Westphalia’s JugendJazzOrchester NRW, in which he played until he began studying jazz at the Hanns Eisler conservatoire in Berlin. He kept playing throughout his studies, whether in Peter Herbolzheimer’s BuJazzO, the RIAS Bigband or Thärichen’s Tentett, and by the time he graduated in 2002, Nils Wülker had already released his enthusiastically received and highly acclaimed debut album “High Spirits” – with the likes of Gene Calderazzo and Orlando Le Fleming – as the first German jazz musician in the SONY Music artist roster.

This Renée Fleming disc, By Request, is mostly a compilation of previously released material. There are three new tracks, "Ah fors' è lui" from Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata, the song "Cäcille" by Richard Strauss, and "You'll Never Walk Alone" from Rogers & Hammerstein's musical Carousel. The new recordings all sound fine, and Fleming is outstanding in the re-issued pieces as well. If you have the prior incarnations of these recordings, you may elect to pass on this collection unless you want the three new tracks.