Music: Without Limits

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How far can jazz go? It's a music of all soul and no limits, but there are, at some times and in some hands, certain arbitrary restrictions. Free form is fine, but the more precise disciplines of melody and orchestration can lead to suspicions of musical conservatism, even retrogression. Yet jazz can--and should--go anywhere, as long as the direction's not conventional, and there is no one better than Charlie Haden at taking an old road to a brand-new place.

Haden's most recent album with his Quartet West, the ravishing The Art of Song (Verve), is a lyrical excursion across a landscape that embraces classical music (Rachmaninoff's Moment Musical), folk (Wayfaring Stranger), American popular song (Kern's In Love in Vain) and contemporary jazz (Jeri Southern's Theme for Charlie and Haden's own Ruth's Waltz). The only thing these disparate pieces have in common is Haden's singular vision, his insistence that this music beats with a single heart that pulses as steadily as his bass swings.

Besides the quartet (pianist Alan Broadbent, drummer Larance Marable and tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts, along with Haden), there are guest vocalists on a few of the cuts (Shirley Horn and Bill Henderson) and a chamber orchestra on others. But it is Haden's spooky, unpolished vocal on Wayfaring Stranger, the closing track on this superb album, that provides a surprising but characteristically intrepid coda, a valedictory from a musical explorer who can find new territory anywhere he wanders.

--By Jay Cocks