Word: quartet
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...Quartet by Alexandros Kalogeras creates an engaging atmosphere of flute, bass clarinet, percussion and piano (keys and strings). The piece begins with a ringing pulse of percussion played by the pianist and flutist and soft, lush bass clarinet. Such stylized, ritualistic moments are followed by dramatic rushes of flute, clarinet, piano strings and swirling, pounding percussion. It is wonderful to listen to and a pleasure to watch...
...November 1959, and Haden has just pulled into New York City. He's keeping fast company, part of a jazz quartet that also includes drummer Billy Higgins, trumpeter Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, who is exploring the outside edge of the stratosphere with his alto sax. They are opening at the Five Spot, the Manhattan mecca for cutting-edge jazz. It is one of those debut dates that are more like a trial by fire: chops will be checked out, irrevocable judgments passed. Slipping the cover off his bass, Haden, who is 22, looks up at the bar and sees...
...jazz. You can figure that from the stats: he has played, by his own count, on more than 400 albums, and last August scored as Down Beat magazine's best acoustic bass player. Or you can hear it for yourself: Haunted Heart, a new album with his Quartet West, shows Haden, now 55, at his lyrical peak. It is a kind of musical-dream autobiography, part funky and part rhapsodic, that evokes the style of his early Los Angeles days as well as the mythic mood of vintage L.A., the film- noir city. Chinatown. Chandlertown...
...pianist Alan Broadbent to reworkings of standards by Parker, Bud Powell and Glenn Miller to -- most surprisingly and, perhaps, most inventively -- three period vocals by Billie Holiday, Jeri Southern and Jo Stafford, copied straight from Haden's 5,000-volume record collection. The songs flow seamlessly out of Quartet West's instrumental excursions, and the effect is closer to magic than nostalgia, like climbing into a Studebaker convertible that rolls out of the fog, letting it take you away again for a ride into the mist...
Well, there is one necessity on Henry's agenda. Bunny -- the unserious one, the blabbermouth, the buffoon -- begins to suspect the quartet of the killing in the field. In general Tartt shows a superior sense of pace, playing off her red herrings and foreshadowings like an old hand at the suspense game. The book's only lag occurs in her needlessly elaborate effort to turn Bunny from a likable pest into someone obnoxious enough for Richard to want to kill (for the others, fear of detection is enough). The cause of Bunny's mounting hysteria, of course, is simple...