Boulevard (The Complete Series)

Boulevard (1995, this 2012 reissue) is Ludovic Navarre’s argument that house music could absorb jazz without losing its function as dance music. The record uses live jazz musicians alongside electronic production — not sampling them, but recording them within the same architecture — and the result works on a dancefloor and holds up as a listening record.

F Communications was Laurent Garnier’s label, run out of Paris. Garnier was one of the few European DJs that the Detroit first wave (Atkins, May, Saunderson) actively championed. Boulevard belongs in the same moment as Guru’s Jazzmatazz — two producers in 1993–95 working on the same intuition, by different methods: jazz and house are not separate genres, they are the same conversation at different tempos.