Jazzanova

If Kruder and Dorfmeister are a blunt before breakfast, then Jazzanova is cocktails after dinner. Stylish and sophisticated, Jazzanova's debut LP (discounting 2000's remix collection), In Between, is a journey through nu jazz that you're not likely to forget. The six-man team from Germany has dominated the jazz-dance and downtempo scenes for the past few years, both with their own label and with countless remixes, but it's In Between that best displays a mature and seasoned unit whose members feel as comfortable making dance floors smoke as they do playing smoky jazz for modern hipsters.

In the City of Brotherly love, Jazzanova embraces the influential Philadelphia scene on In Between. The album is rife with guest vocalists, and is a veritable who's who of Philly soul. Man of the moment Victor Duplaix (whose own "Sensuality" was an underground stormer earlier this year) shines as he drops the uptempo "Soon" and the smoothed-out "Wasted Time." Only poet Ursula Rucker and MC Capital K fail to deliver over Jazzanova's sublime orchestration. Whereas Capital K's contribution is a noble-yet-failed experiment, "Keep Falling" is a sad indication that Rucker has not grown or changed since she blew minds on the Roots' classic "The Unlocking" (off 1995's Do You Want More?).

Musically, the LP is flawless. As a modernist composition, it is steeped in the '70s jazz and soul of artists like McCoy Tyner and Roy Ayers. Jazzanova's hip-hop production is exciting and innovative, particularly the beautifully broken album opener "L.O.V.E. and You & I." The instrumental "Glow and Glare" takes the best elements of François Kevorkian's 1980s production and updates it to create a monster of a mid-tempo dance track. The rest of the album beautifully combines elements of broken beat, Afro tech and acid jazz to create music that is indicative of the fact that the dance floor and its dancers have grown up.