TCHOKOLA

As Jean-Luc Ponty came out of the 1980s, which for him had mostly been a decade of musical stagnation in which memorable musical moments were far outnumbered by unassuming filler, he decided that it was time for a swift change in musical direction and thus he embraced the concept of world fusion, augmenting his sound with African chanting choirs, rhythms and "tribal" percussion. The result sadly sounds less like a sincere attempt at artistic reinvention and more like a hackneyed attempt at hopping on a semi-popular bandwagon of the time. It clearly did not rejuvenate Ponty's own flame either because the man goes through the motions like never before on this album: there's nothing interesting about these saccharine compositions, his playing rarely impresses, and his violin tone sounds overly slick and processed, which together with the thoroughly lackluster production (with the same muddy bass and flat, unreverberated guitar twiddling about in the background the whole time) only helps to make this a very dull listening experience. The culture of the African continent deserves better representation than this hackwork.