Nina Simone opens French Cuisine, as Alif Tree makes his devotions clear: Simone‘s “Plain Gold Ring” is as sophisticated and heart wrenching as jazz will ever be. Alif Tree‘s minimalist vinyl-crackle-and-warm-beats reworking of that vocal into his own “Deadly Species” shows the Frenchman lovingly crafting acoustic sounds and electronic productions into a seamless, melancholy shuffle. Anna Karina, Shirley Horn, French library music, and Parisian café jazz all get the Alif Tree makeover on an album that would‘ve been as at home in a Truffaut film as on a certain German label of no little renown.