{"product_id":"stgermain-tourist","title":"St Germain - Tourist","description":"\u003cp\u003eSince the advent of acid jazz in the mid-'80s, the many electronic-jazz hybrids to come down the pipe have steadily grown more mature, closer to a balanced fusion that borrows the spontaneity and emphasis on group interaction of classic jazz while still emphasizing the groove and elastic sound of electronic music. For his second album, French producer Ludovic Navarre expanded the possibilities of his template for jazzy house by recruiting a sextet of musicians to solo over his earthy productions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe opener \"Rose Rouge\" is an immediate highlight, as an understated Marlena Shaw vocal sample (\"I want you to get together\/put your hands together one time\"), trance-state piano lines, and a ride-on-the-rhythm drum program frames solos by trumpeter Pascal Ohse and baritone Claudio de Qeiroz. For \"Montego Bay Spleen,\" Navarre pairs an angular guitar solo by Ernest Ranglin with a deep-groove dub track, complete with phased effects and echoey percussion. \"Land Of...\" moves from a Hammond- and horn-led soul-jazz stomp into Caribbean territory, marked by more hints of dub and the expressive Latin percussion of Carneiro.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOccasionally, Navarre's programming (sampled or otherwise) grows a bit repetitious - even for dance fans, to say nothing of the jazzbo crowd attracted by the album's Blue Note tag. Though it is just another step on the way to a perfect blend of jazz and electronic, \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e is an excellent one. – (via \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.allmusic.com\/album\/tourist-mw0000619110\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAll Music)\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e—\u003cbr\u003eOn its 20th anniversary, Andrew Ryce looks back at a landmark in smooth house music:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt's 2002, and I'm 12 years old, flipping through the CD collection of my latest step-mom, who had moved into my dad's house so quickly I barely had time to meet her. One night I stayed up late to see what kind of music was in her collection. There was an enormous amount of cool, late-'90s electronic music I had only heard about before. Acid jazz like Medeski, Martin \u0026amp; Wood, stuff like Meat Beat Manifesto. St. Germain's \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e, one of the most successful house albums of all time, caught my eye. The bright colours and timetable on the front cover seemed urbane and impossibly cool. When I first put it on, I felt classy listening to it, like I was living some elegant fantasy life far beyond my years and means.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFast forward to 2020 and putting on \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e is to transport back what feels like an incredibly specific time. Nightclubs had been chased out of New York by Giuliani's decree, as part of an overall whitewashing of the city, but house music—ever more tasteful, melodic and hip—was everywhere you looked. Not just in New York, but in London, Toronto, Los Angeles and Paris, too. At every nice restaurant, at every cocktail lounge, all over TV shows like Sex \u0026amp; The City. Fusion-restaurant house was ubiquitous, and French producer Ludovic Navarre's second LP was king of them all.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt's easy to deride this kind of music as derivative. And a lot of it is. But not \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e. The album is the  culmination of a successful dance music career, a nearly instrumental album that sold more than four million copies. It laid the foundations for a style that still rules the places where you can sip a $16 martini and lounge on leather cushions, a sound that still signifies some notion of taste and class for a certain subset of the world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e is revered and lampooned for the same reason: its unironic sincerity, its knack for going there. This is a record that kicks off with \"Rose Rouge,\" a house tune built around the rhythm section from Dave Brubeck's \"Take Five.\" And why not? \"Take Five,\" after all, is one of the best songs of all time, and the sound of the piano and brushed drums is a shortcut to another era. Complete it with the husky vocal from a 1970s Marlene Shaw performance and a trumpet solo from Pascal Ohsé, and you start to feel like you're at a bar you can't afford, or a party you're not swanky enough to attend.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe album takes you on a trip through the sixth arrondissement neighbourhood that gave Ludovic Navarre his artist name, and through Paris beyond it. St. Germain was famous for its lively post-war jazz scene: \"Rose Rouge\" was the name of a cabaret; \"Pont Des Arts\" is a bridge that connects the sixth and first arrondissements across the Seine; \"Latin Note\" is a nod to the city's famous Latin Quarter, another cultural hub, next to St. Germain, while \"La Guotte D'or\" refers to an African neighbourhood in the 18th arrondissement.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt's also, as much of Navarre's career has been, a blend of musical styles. \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e is discussed in the context of acid jazz or lounge house, but aside from the choice of instruments, it's much more than that. The LP touches on blues, Chicago house and, particularly, dub, an important part of the album whose influence usually goes overlooked.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDub runs through the pulse of the best tracks on the album. \"Land Of...\" is one of Navarre's most accomplished tracks, effortlessly switching tack from dub to jazz rhythms—check out the piano break in the middle, which sounds like Duke Ellington's \"In A Sentimental Mood\"—on top of a relaxed breakbeat. This is turn-of-the-millennium dance music genre alchemy. And the Scientist-sampling \"Montego Bay Spleen\" features the incredible playing from Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin, who plucks and strums in languid circles around Navarre's calm dub beat. It's truly remarkable playing, not just an aesthetic gimmick.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe musicianship is another misunderstood part of \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e. Navarre isn't simply putting down beats under jazz tracks or cutting up saxophone players from the '60s—most of the tracks feature solos laid down live by contemporary musicians, transforming \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e from jazz-hop pastiche to a true jazz record, albeit one with a different kind of rhythm section (It even came out on the legendary jazz label Blue Note, which was dipping its toes into electronic music.) The live musicianship is what gives \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e its panache and its most arresting details, like how the vibraphone shimmers across the stereo spectrum in glorious detail on \"Latin Note.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNot that Navarre wasn't good at sampling: he takes a '90s-era collaboration between John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis and makes it the foundation for \"Sure Thing,\" a laid-back jam that lets Hooker's guitar and voice do the talking. Hooker's angelic notes glide across the track, sounding almost inhumanly perfect at times, weaving and dipping through melodic figures in a way you'd never get on a quantized grid. Tracks like \"Sure Thing\" remind you that no matter the context, or how it was put together, you can't deny the soul of Tourist, which is more than the sum of its parts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSoul is what sets \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e apart from everything else that sounds like it. It's hard to divorce it from the clichés it helped inspire, but in this album you can hear the groundwork for musical adventures like Mala In Cuba, or the long-running Verve jazz remix series. Navarre took a glossy style often reduced to anonymity and infused it with personality. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBefore he conquered the world with \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e, touring so long that he ended up tired of the music (and not releasing anything else for almost 15 years after), Navarre was a credible club producer. He was first signed to Laurent Garnier's F Communications, and under aliases like Nuages and Deepside, he made earthy house, jacking techno and styles that would hint at the revolution to come with \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e. (The Chicago tribute \"Jack On The Groove,\" released as D.S., is an essential track you can hear on the From Detroit To St. Germain compilation.) So when he released \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e he wasn't so much cashing in on a trend as fleshing out the jazzy sound he started, standing in opposition to the glitzy disco mania of French house at the time. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEnding up a mainstream success and bringing house music to the masses once again, \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e was eyed suspiciously by hardcore enthusiasts on either side of the jazz-dance divide. (A notorious Village Voice review called it \"NPR techno.\") But it's a wonderful time capsule with sensibilities that still ring true today: great drum programming, heartfelt jazz playing and a stylistic range palatable to both electronic music haters and club dance floors alike. (\"Pont Des Arts\" is a lost organ house anthem.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNavarre has since moved on to working with West African artists and musical styles, but \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e casts a long shadow over everything else under the St. Germain name. Sure, it's not perfect—the dated \"So Flute\" is better forgotten—but \u003cem\u003eTourist\u003c\/em\u003e deserves its place in the house music pantheon, creating a sound that, for a time, seemed to be pretty much everywhere. — (via \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/ra.co\/reviews\/25135\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"\u003eResident Advisor\u003c\/a\u003e)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ciframe width=\"300\" height=\"380\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/album\/0YqCvOMhp8enM01an9Nntj\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\" allow=\"encrypted-media\"\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ciframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/98sUeR3r5VQ?si=s2P1Fz5a_4JWfdgO\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e↓\u003cbr\u003eLabel: Parlophone ‎\u003cbr\u003eFormat: 2 × Vinyl, 12\", Album, Reissue, Remastered, 180gram, Gatefold\u003cbr\u003eReissued: 2012 \/ Original: 2000\u003cbr\u003eGenre: Electronic, Jazz\u003cbr\u003eStyle: Deep House, Future Jazz, Downtempo\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFile under: Electronic \/\/ Downtempo\u003cbr\u003e⦿\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Parlophone","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41456886251678,"sku":"5099963622010","price":55.0,"currency_code":"SGD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0584\/5434\/3838\/files\/st.germain.jpg?v=1707820253","url":"https:\/\/theanalogvault.mom\/products\/stgermain-tourist","provider":"The Analog Vault","version":"1.0","type":"link"}