Juice In The Jungle - by Craig Havighurst
Grab your best headphones, kick back, and watch this understated, mesmerizing tour de force.
This was a wholly AI based discovery, so hats off to Skynet I guess. YouTube suggested a twenty-minute, five-song suite by an artist I’d never heard of named Vicent Fenton and called FKJ for his moniker French Kiwi Juice. The backstory is that his dad’s a New Zealand Kiwi and his mom is French, and France is where he grew up. I do not claim to follow the French Nu Jazz scene, but I’ve come to understand that Mr. FKJ is a well-established multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer. He lives I don’t know where, but this home studio locale is tropical and dreamy. (After you check out this performance, you might watch his wedding video, and you’ll know with existential certitude that your life is colorless and pedestrian.)
This project - Ylang Ylang - knocks me out for formal reasons that go beyond the heady music. As we’ve observed touring grow ever-more essential to a living as a musician, while the the fiscal return on prolonged recording studio sessions has plunged, we’ve lost touch with an art form. I don’t mean the idea of the album but the studio creation, the kind of obsessively crafted sonic journeys we got from Stevie Wonder, Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Steely Dan. That’s how I hear this meticulously arranged flow, as a studio opus where we just happen to see most of the parts played live. It’s a hybrid work that reminds me of that bygone era but with updates perfect for our time. It’s an online performance, the medium of the Covid era. Yet it’s a rarity - a seamless, one-take run of a full EP, captured on film. FKJ plays in uncanny tandem with a programmed support structure. He plays piano, keys, guitar and sax, transitioning between them with baffling fluidity. He sings and subtly manipulates his playback gear. The feel is a chilled, hip-hop meets world-beat house concoction that can scan as jazz or pop. There is at least one big, delightful surprise. Just enjoy.
What a world. A cat this on top of it can be killing it over in Europe, or wherever he is, and it takes a robot to let me know about it.
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