French trumpeter and composer Erik Truffaz has been so heavily involved with electronica that it may cause you to pose that old, stuffy argument: Can he really play? Well it took me going back to his 1997 CD, Out of a Dream (still not available in the U.S.), to convince me that he indeed can hold his own without the safety net of loops, drum programming and Pro Tools. But like last year’s The Mask, the sloppy seconds remix CD Revisite (Blue Note 7243 5 32612 2; 47:43 ) isn’t going to sway anyone who sees Truffaz as a limited trumpeter, regurgitating the fusion innovations of Miles Davis. Employing heavyweight ambient, 2-step, jazz and electronica artists such as Alex Gopher, Bugge Wesseltoft and Mobile in Motion, Revisite offers the same batch of Milesian tunes from The Mask, but instead of constructing new rhythmic pulses or arrangements to deter any comparisons to Miles, Revisit‚ exposes Truffaz’s fawning emulations of the prince of darkness even more.
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