ALTERNATIF

As many electronic gurus with melodic tendencies, the debut album of Jean Marc Corvisier, aka JAZ, is somewhere between VANGELIS and his conterranean Jean Michel JARRE. Good references, isn't it?

The album is fully instrumental and is clearly a one-man electronic effort. It sometimes reminds also to what Peter BARDENS was releasing in the same period, the final part of Extreme II in particular. Differently from many electronic artists, his music is not much repetitive. I can define it as an easy-listening ambient music, relaxing and very suitable for soundtracks. I can imagine it commenting a National Geographic documentary, and if you consider that Vangelis has released a couple of very good albums as soundtracks of Frederic Rossif's documentaries, that's not a bad thing for sure.

The musical themes are quite variable even inside the same track. Being fully electronic the drums don't vary much, but this staticity in the tempo is counterbalanced by the variations in the melodic line which happen several times inside the same track. My personal favorite on this album is Atom, but the whole can be listened without taking care of which track you are listening to as it's omogeneous in the sound.

Taking into account that's a self production and self-released, the audio quality is very good, which I think is an essential requirement for an electronic album.

So, nothing very original but nothing bad, too. A good but non-essential debut from 1994.