BUGGE WESSELTOFT — Duo (with Henrik Schwarz) (review)

BUGGE WESSELTOFT — Duo (with Henrik Schwarz) album cover Album · 2011 · Jazz Related Electronica/Hip-Hop Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
js
Nu jazz meets ambient techno and the sum is greater than the parts in the hands of these two excellent craftsmen. Good ambient techno is hard to come by these days. With the rise of cheap music making software any Joe with a computer can create endless amounts of new age sounding drivel, but ambient techno was never supposed to be that saccharine sweet, nor that easy to produce. Henrik Schwarz gets it right on here with that perfect blend of barely audible ambience and dry airy textures that are never sentimental. Add to that Bugge Wesseltoft’s very tasty and never overbearing treated piano and electric piano you have one very nice modern jazz CD.

Bugge’s playing on here is what you would expect from a modern electronica/jazz keyboardist, sort of a minimal Herbie Hancock-lite approach that mirrors Herbie’s own work mixing jazz and electronics back in the 70s. The fact that Bugge chooses to stick with real piano and Fender Rhodes is a great choice as it keeps the CD from sounding like the ambient techno generica herd. There is a very warm sense of play on here that verges on outright humorous satire on ‘Leave my Head Alone Brain’. On this one Wesseltoft plays piano clichés from the very early days of Chicago acid house while Schwarz brings the thump thump house beat as well as cliché slow moving high pass filter sweeps that were all the rage in 90s electro-dance music. Fortunately the two don’t get so carried away with their humor that this cut becomes a sore thumb, instead it blends with all the others as the whole CD becomes one big ambient electro-jazz soundscape where individual songs don’t matter much.

If you like a modern mixture of jazz and electronics along the lines of Spacetime Contiuum’s ‘Double Fine Zone’, then I doubt you will be disappointed in the careful thought and sensitive musicianship that went into constructing this very subtle gem.
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