Jazz Reviews : Charlie Haden’s Quartet Takes High Road

Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, which closed Sunday at Catalina’s, covers so much territory in a single set that its slogan might well be “Around the World in Seven Tunes.”

Haden, the composer and bassist who rose to fame in the 1960s with Ornette Coleman, shares the credits with three equally skilled musicians: Ernie Watts on tenor sax, Alan Broadbent on piano and Larance Marable on drums.

These are not your everyday be-boppers--though the opening number might have given that impression--because it was an old Charlie Parker line, “Passport,” for which Watts assumed the melodic responsibility before plunging into the first several choruses of hard-driving extemporization.

The idiom changed as the group wrapped itself around Pat Metheny’s “Hermitage,” with a minor key and a Latin beat, and with Watts in a more subdued mood.

Haden’s all-embracing scope took a turn for the basics with his simple and charming calypso, “Child’s Play,” during which the brilliant, harmonically imaginative Broadbent supplied sensitive chording. Marable, in a long but rarely boring solo, went through some interesting motions with sticks on his high-hat cymbal.

Haden himself was the key figure in a long freedom excursion, displaying his customary finesse, telling stories in long lines and occasional chords. Watts took some uncivil liberties with his horn, and the whole thing, despite a splendid Broadbent interlude, went on so interminably that the next number, a bop line on “All the Things You Are,” came as a much-needed contrast.

What is most impressive about Quartet West is its sense of unity. Having worked together off and on for two or three years, these men are thoroughly attuned to one another’s innovative ideas. If they do stumble now and then in their global circumnavigation, the passages of smooth sailing make the journey worthwhile.