Kuma - Honey & Groat

When Betty Davis presented Sly Stone's funky hippies to her dear Miles, when Herbie Hancock discovered the Fender Rhodes and the Moog synthesiser, when the CTI/Kudu label came up with the smooth jazz of Grover Washington or Bob James, when Gilles Peterson and the acid-jazz period revived the links that unite the various facets of African-American music, on each of these occasions opinion was divided between orthodoxy and hedonism. How do you reconcile "serious" music and simple pleasure? Ever since jazz took its bop and free turn, each generation solved this eternal equation in its own way.

Trained in the theoretical rigours of classical music and jazz, experts on their instruments, and brought up on hip-hop culture, techno and house club scenes, Matthieu Llodra and Arthur Donnot - composers of KUMA – love to challenge their musical boundaries. With the help of multi-talented sound engineer Valentin Liechti, they intentionally turned away from the live sound towards a more controlled production style, both in terms of the writing and the recording.

Maxence Sibille’s drums and Fabien Iannone’s bass, in all sobriety, display a range of sounds and grooves blurring the perception between playing and programming, acoustic and electronic.

Themes turn into loops, in a jazz form of writing that metabolised the sampling culture. Just like the musicians in the ‘70s and ‘80s who melted Afro-american art music with pop trends, Llodra and Donnot belong to this generation that naturally reinvents a kind of smooth jazz from the XXIst century.

The elegant harmonies of a brass section (‘Trois Petits Beussekeu’, ‘Feux-gris’), Léo Chambet’s warm voice (‘Der Küss) and Cyril Moulas' mesmerising guitar (‘Tardigrada’) make this somewhat restrained yet generous album complete.

Listening to ‘Honey & Groat’, sweetness and elegance are evident from the start. The themes come and they go, not like a rendez-vous, these collective checkmarks that classical jazz imposes on the ego of the soloists, rather like the hooks on instrumental electro tracks. An anchor for the listener, a chorus, between ostinato and ritornello, a motif transformed to fit the moment.