DINO PACIFICI

The Blue Velvet Lounge

Dance Plant Records/Scorpio Rising Music (2002)

sorry - no album cover art available at this time

review by Bill Binkelman

Dry martini cool, 15-year old single malt scotch smooth, and original Rat Pack hip, Canadian Dino Pacifici's latest release, The Blue Velvet Lounge is all this - and more. Pacifici has always been one of the more versatile electronic keyboard players in the ambient/new age genres - and now he returns to the same landscape he previously explored on one of his older albums, Urban Oasis, with more than a few twists along the way, of course.

The Blue Velvet Lounge is a second cousin, sort of, to Richard Bone's Coxa. However, where Coxa was a sly electronica homage to 1950s jazz, The Blue Velvet Lounge is a straight-up fusion recording, incorporating elements of lounge, smooth jazz, electronica, funk, and other groove-inhabited genres. Pacifici plies his trade on a vast arsenal of keyboards as well as also offering some licks on ultra-tasty electric guitar. This album is a stone blast and is one of the most "fun" recordings I've heard in 2003.

I don't have the space to detail every track, so I'll just hit some of my personal faves. "Mirage" and "Dreams in Green" both sound like the breezy friendly pan-Asian fusion instrumental music that the well-known ensemble Hiroshima cut their reputation on. Both tracks feature a sampled koto (a Japanese stringed-instrument) layered alongside either funky drum-kit beats and spacy keyboards ("Mirage") or sexy strutting rhythms and pan flute samples ("Dreams in Green"). "Itzabout" could be vintage Spyrogyra (sans their characteristic sax), especially when Pacifici mixes in his George Benson-ish guitar playing amongst the bell-tone keyboards and bouncy beats. I really dig the Fender Rhodes (electric piano) samples (or maybe the real thing?) set against snazzy ethnic percussion on "Voices in My Head." "Bossa on the Breeze" is a great treatment of those sexy South American rhythms, embellished with lush synth strings and delicious Hammond organ work, as well as some fat bass lines. "Why" is a very tasty slice of trip-hop with the deepest bottom on the album and it will compel yer ass to start shakin.' The title track is probably my absolute personal favorite with its pumping bass beats, muted synth chorus, midtempo drum kit work and spacy keyboards.

Of course, enjoying this CD will take a certain amount of placing your "tongue-in-cheek." But that's also part of the album's appeal, i.e. its sense of good-natured fun. You'll either "get" the retro wah-wah guitar of "Nights" or you won't. The same is true of the Tower of Power horn samples on the oh-so-soulful "Transmitting Data."

The only downside of an album like The Blue Velvet Lounge is having any certainty of who to recommend it to. Obviously, Richard Bone "cyber-lounge" fans should consider it essential. Likewise devotees of jazz fusion or lounge music. Chill-out lovers may find some of the tracks too jazzy and uptempo, and of course those curmudgeonly ambient aficionados will run for cover, I'd wager. If you're a smooth jazz hound, a funky rhythm fanatic, or just someone who considers themselves a swingin' cat, The Blue Velvet Lounge should become your new hang-out. You'll spend many an enjoyable hour there, swaying to the beats and snappin' you fingers, provided you don't have a vodka martini in one hand and a blonde in the other!