Where the Sun Beats – Dominique Bérose, 1990

🎹🌴🇬🇵🎸☀️ For his second album, in 1990, Dominique Bérose repeated the exercise with KVOX, Thierry David’s label. But this time he was no longer alone. Whereas he recorded the whole of Blackfire himself, this time he has enlisted a seasoned team for this second opus, Where The Sun Beats. Twelve tracks of tropical smooth jazz, Latin rhythms, West Indian reminiscences, jazz funk and fusion, it’s the ideal mood to illustrate these rhythms of the sun. Among his acolytes is the formidable Patrick Viau de Caumette, renowned composer, guitarist and arranger, unfortunately too often hidden away in illegible credits, and who a few years ago resurrected some famous collaborations with Félix Sabal-Lecco and Richard Bona. Look them up! On bass, Henri Dorina is also a long-time accomplice, and the horns of Tony Russo and Pierre Mimran are excellent. Restless Bay was rearranged and revived some twenty years later, on the album Parcours, in a new, more African version. Where the Sun Beats is a model of the West Coast jazz that was all the rage at the time, with the Caribbean twist that Dominique Bérose brings to it, with his arrangements somewhere between George Duke and Malavoi, his unique mastery of the synth and a real talent for composition.