- What ever happened to the house music virtuoso? A quick look through RA's best tracks of 2017 reveals a surfeit of tracky productions, breaks and experimental music. There's barely a keyboard solo or a hand-played instrument. It's this state of affairs that leaves producers like Lars Bartkuhn, Byron The Aquarius and Jimi Tenor swimming upstream. Their music is indebted to the in-the-pocket skills required for jazz and funk, not in-the-box sound design. However, the omnivorous dance floor listener or DJ does themselves a disservice ignoring their output.
Take Tenor for instance. The Finnish mainstay has released a staggering amount of excellent, often overlooked material in the last few years—for starters, a vocal house album as part of Cola & Jimmu and two albums with the UMO Jazz Orchestra. Perhaps the Studio Barnhus team can point people in the right direction. He's linked up with his old collaborator Freestyle Man for the Sleepover EP on the Swedish label.
Tenor and Freestyle Man (born Klas-Henrik Lindblad) first appeared together on a couple of the former's mid-'90s 12-inches, released Tenor's Sähkö Recordings sublabel, Puu. They still sound on top of their game 20 years later. These tracks burst with memorable chord progressions, masterful leads and vocal hooks. In terms of the vocals, Tenor is not Romanthony, but "Pyjama Party"'s lyrics—"Call your mommy you won't be home tonight... Oh what a night it's gonna be, hanging out with friends in the nightclub"—are so silly and pure you'll forgive the thin quality of his voice. "Temple Of Music" and "Turku" include flute trills, Metro Area-style synth bass and in the former case, a towering chorus on the healing properties of dance music. These are virtuosic tunes expressing the simple, utopic promise of house.
TracklistA1 Power Of Love
A2 Pyjama Party
B1 Temple Of Music
B2 Turku