Charlie Haden: The Art of the Song (Verve)

Once an iconoclastic, avant garde bassist, Charlie Haden seems to have evolved into an almost classical conservative with this album. It's beautiful, certainly; there is much to savour and admire in this marriage of his Quartet West with strings and two singers, Shirley Horn and Bill Henderson, especially pianist Alan Broadbent's writing and Horn's amazing gift for emotional depth and tension at the slowest tempos; her Folks Who Live On The Hill is gorgeous. The quartet is not really foregrounded here - a pity, because Broadbent and tenor Ernie Watts deserve more limelight than they get - while Henderson's intonation is decidedly shaky at times, but overall it's a superior mood album. Somehow, though, the whole is a little less than the sum of its considerable parts.

Ray Comiskey

Cannonball Adderley and the Poll-Winners (Capitol)

A summit meeting of poll winners from 1960 brought together Adderley with guitarist Wes Montgomery, supported by a stellar rhythm section - Vic Feldman, Ray Brown and Louis Hayes - for a relaxed engagement of musical minds. Perhaps mutual respect made it a mite too relaxed; everybody plays well, with Feldman (on piano and vibes) and Montgomery really impressive soloists, but it's Adderley, on alto, who consistently provides the kind of edge such an encounter might have been expected to deliver. His solos on both takes of the Parker blues, Au Privave, on Lehar's Yours Is My Heart Alone and Loesser's Never Will I Marry are virtual definitions of what bop alto, at its best, was about at the time.

Ray Comiskey