Night And The City

Description

Except for applause at the end of a couple of tunes and a single quiet cough, you might not be aware you re listening to a club recording, so hushed is the Iridium audience during this quietly intense 1996 musical dialogue between Kenny Barron and Charlie Haden. The ballad conversations are so intimate that it s almost inappropriate to break them up into the constituent players, but Barron is magnificent, opting for single-note lines over Haden s deeply resonant bass, stringing out a continuum of inventive, often double-time phrases that animate the slowest tempos. Even the chromatic fantasia that introduces the luminous "Very Thought of You" is spare. With Haden, less is more; there s never an unnecessary note, never a superfluous phrase. His accompaniments consist of only the barest harmonic substructure and the minimal pulse, while his solos sing as unadorned melody. Each piece is given time to unfold (the seven selections last 70 minutes), and the results are quietly intense, sometimes exalted, music-making. It s fine late-night listening, in the city or anywhere else. --Stuart Broomer