A Winning Combination

Pianist Kenny Barron’s continuing series of first-rate musical outings produces yet another impressive performance in this perfectly titled, spontaneous partnership with bassist Charlie Haden. They have recorded together before--most notably on Barron’s Grammy-nominated 1995 “Wanton Spirit”--but never in the stark, musically demanding setting of bass and piano alone. The new album, recorded in September 1996 at the Iridium club in New York, is a superb example of mature, thoughtful improvisation, with the focus clearly placed upon Barron’s deft skill as a ballad player.

Barron has long played the role of super-sideman, the kind of pianist who not only can fit into every imaginable stylistic environment but also can do so with unerring musical integrity. He has played bebop with James Moody and Lou Donaldson, was a mainstay in Dizzy Gillespie’s band and co-led Sphere, a group celebrating the music of Thelonious Monk. As Stan Getz’s primary accompanist in the late ‘80s, Barron played a significant role in triggering a creative period in the tenor saxophonist’s last years. And more recently Barron has explored the nexus between jazz, electronics and Brazilian rhythms with percussionist Mino Cinelu.

Working with Haden, however, places Barron front and center, playing the sort of familiar standards that can be the most demanding test of a jazz artist’s capacity for originality. And Haden enhances the potential of the test by playing an almost completely supportive role, stepping into the foreground only rarely, content, in his own words, to “showcase Kenny’s expertise in the art of playing ballads.”

That expertise is apparent from the album’s very first notes--a pensive, impressionistic exposition of Barron’s own lovely melody “Twilight Song.” Capable of retaining an implicit rhythmic surge within the most rhapsodic moments, he plays both the theme and its variations with a current of rhythm underscoring the passionate intimacy of his phrasing.

Among the other numbers, “For Heaven’s Sake” emphasizes a soaring combination of melody and harmony, and “The Very Thought of You” and Haden’s “Waltz for Ruth” are filled with continually surprising little musical twists and turns. “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” as with most of the other readings, opens with a pensive Barron theme statement before the entry of Haden’s bass. It features--as do, particularly, “Body and Soul” and “The Very Thought of You”--a typically spare and melodic Haden solo.

The only criticism about this otherwise compatible musical partnership is Haden’s tendency--an essential of his style--to delve a bit too deeply into pedal-note accompaniment (that is, a repetition of the same fundamental note through a series of changing harmonies). Effective much of the time in his playing, it doesn’t work with “Spring Is Here,” rooting that delicate melody in a fashion that intrudes upon the very meaning of the song.

But Haden, who co-produced the album with his wife, Ruth, was right to showcase Barron’s ballad playing throughout most of this sensitive, musically enchanting performance. “I just wanted it to be about elegance,” he says. And that’s precisely what it is.

* Barron and Haden will appear at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, on April 3 and 4. (714) 556-2787.

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