" data-original-title="" title="">Gigi Masin. Depending on taste, you may find the album mellifluous and relaxing, or vacuous and inconsequential.

Unintentionally but irrefutably, Foat and Masin's project highlights the unbridgeable disconnect between jazz and ambient. Jazz is intended to be actively listened to, to be met halfway and engaged with. Ambient is designed to hover in the background, without conscious attention being paid to it, while more important activities (compiling the shopping list, doing the ironing) are engaged in. In any "collaboration" between the two genres, ambient's prescriptive play-it-safe paradigms—rhythmic, melodic, dynamic—must be complied with, for the horses must never be frightened. If, on the other hand, jazz's unfettered stretching-the-envelope aesthetic comes out on top, the ambient half of the equation is subsumed. Flip that around, put ambient's restrictions on top, and you get the abomination known as smooth jazz.