Like his frequent performance partner, Sting, trumpeter Chris Botti is a master of detail and nuance, utilizing careful layers and details to build a mood. This quality is evidenced nicely on Night Sessions (Columbia 85753; 45:20), Botti’s paean to the sensual sounds of European club music. Botti hits just the right pitch here, capturing bittersweet reflection on the jazzy, sparse shuffle “Miami Overnight,” for example, evoking the mood of watching the last candle of a rapturous night burn down. Dark detail is also at work on “Lisa,” with sensuous rhythms augmented by a romantic guitar strum, not to mention Botti’s haunting trumpet melody. European colors also shine through on the dancing “All Would Envy,” a graceful story-song to which Shawn Colvin adds just the right detached club-singer read, and the majestically reflective after-hours piece “Light the Stars.” Botti’s versatility and imagination also shine here, in the charged-particle, hyper-funk bursts of “Streets Ahead” and the flapping, hyper-heartbeat atmosphere that plays against the trumpeter’s languid-lined grain on “Blue Horizon.”
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