[JPL] Bruce Hornsby - Question and Answer

[Jazz Promo Services]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/arts/music/06choi.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref
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BRUCE HORNSBY
³Camp Meeting²
(Legacy)

Bruce Hornsby¹s music has always gestured toward jazz, if a bit obliquely.
As a pianist and songwriter, he finds ways of infusing even the most
straightforward pop tune with chord inversions, bop allusions, flights of
improvisation. With ³Camp Meeting² he has gone a step further, creating an
instrumental jazz album with the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the bassist
Christian McBride.

An air of defensiveness hangs over this enterprise, which opens with a
hide-and-seek Ornette Coleman composition, ³Questions and Answers,² and
later tackles John Coltrane¹s ³Giant Steps,² the jazz equivalent of a
standardized proficiency test. There are also themes by Bud Powell, Keith
Jarrett and Thelonious Monk, all pianistic influences. Respect obviously
isn¹t the problem here.

The problem, if that¹s what you want to call it, is Mr. Hornsby¹s
distinctive harmonic dialect and rhythmic stamp. His chord voicings on Miles
Davis¹s ³Solar,² for instance, end up turning it into something like a Bruce
Hornsby song. It doesn¹t help (or hurt, depending on your point of view)
that Mr. DeJohnette and Mr. McBride accommodate Mr. Hornsby so graciously,
bending toward a comfortably laid-back feel.

Perhaps predictably, Mr. Hornsby sounds least pressured when he¹s playing
his own songs. The most rewarding of the bunch is ³Stacked Mary Possum,²
which taps into the same mythic Appalachia conjured on Mr. Hornsby¹s recent
duet album with Ricky Skaggs. As the rhythm section brightly percolates
beside him, he plays as if he has nothing to lose, or fear. Maybe for a
moment he forgot he was playing jazz. NATE CHINEN