Urban Junkies | Music | Review: Erik Truffaz: 'Arkhangelsk'

The outer limits of jazz...

It's always been hard to squeeze French trumpeter Erik Truffaz into any of jazz's sub-generic tags. His lively imagination and open-mindedness to embracing elements of hip-hop, rock and electronic dance music means that nearly all his albums happily fall between the cracks of smooth jazz, straight-ahead jazz or indeed jazz-fusion.

His new release 'Arkhangelsk' once again displays a pioneering spirit. Recorded with his established quartet - Marcello Giuliani on bass, Marc Erbetta on drums and Patrick Muller on piano and keyboards - it's a collection of elegant tracks often featuring Ed Harcourt on vocals. Again you can hear why Truffaz's trumpet playing has been compared to an 'In A Silent Way'-era Miles Davis.

Where it fails on the twee 'Nobody Puts In The Corner', it justifies itself on the almost jazz-techno minimalism of 'Miss Kaba', the spell-binding introverted rock of 'Red Cloud' and the rap-led 'Trippin' The Lovelight Fantastic'.

Whilst this stands up better in some places than others and certainly runs out of propulsion towards the middle, it has enough moments when Truffaz's ideas creatively gel to deserve hard drive space on the iPod of anyone interested in the outer limits of jazz music whose taste stretches as far as Carl Craig, Zero 7 and Radiohead. This is purely jazz music for non-purists.

Erik Truffaz: 'Arkhangelsk' out on Blue Note. Available on Amazon.co.uk.