Rewind: Tourist Class

St Germain, Tourist

Jazz happened for me in 1970 with Miles Davis' weird electric experiment, Bitches Brew.  It baffled me, with John McLaughlin's staccato guitar, Wayne Shorter's otherworldly sax and, everywhere, Davis' echo-plexed trumpet. This was Davis' fusion masterpiece and it would be another four years before I heard and fell for the "cool jazz" that had won Davis reknown in the '50's.

For a time I was mesmerized by Bitches; I loved its shifts, from dark to light, from stillness to

motion. If there was story here -- hinted at by John Berg's Afro-psychedelic cover -- I never cracked the code.  But it forever changed how I listened to music.

Fifteen year-old Tourist sounds nothing like Bitches Brew; by most lights, it isn't a jazz record at all.   But in its shiftiness and indecipherability, it reminds me of Davis' record. Now a "lounge music" classic, Tourist is a rapid fire journey through genres and world music styles from the changing collective that producer Ludovic Navarre calls St. Germain.


Tourist plainly touched a global nerve;  I've heard its tracks in shops and bars from Williamsburg to Amsterdam to Johannesburg.  A homebrew of dub, some deep house, gospel sounds, a little French-fried pop, Grover Washington- and Latin influenced jazz, it never lets you rest.  It's aural caffeine.

We now live in a world where this kind of disruptivness is celebrated.  Tourist invites you to go with it on tracks like this down-tempo classic, "Sure Thing":

Or on "So Flute," which starts like Herbie Mann on speed -- in a good way:

Pack your bags.