French trumpeter Erik Truffaz was one of the pioneers of the so-called “nu-jazz” movement in the mid 1990s. For a while it looked like he was going to run Esbjörn Svensson and

Nils Petter Molvær

close in the race to wed jazz to dance grooves and find a wider, hipper audience. Nowadays nu jazz is old-hat – a new generation of genre-blind European musicians have rendered the term all but redundant – but Truffaz deserves credit for sticking to his guns and honing his spacey sound over a dozen or so albums for Blue Note. His Miles Davis- derived musings, draped languorously over hypnotic rock and hip-hop rhythms laid down by keyboardist Benoît Corboz, bassist Marcello Giuliani and drummer Marc Erbetta, have an undeniable appeal.

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