Bruce Hornsby – Camp Meeting

Columbia Legacy 9663

As they say in the business, Bruce Hornsby has some heavy friends. He enlists their aid in this album, an endeavor sure to wrinkle both noses and brows of jazz purists who know him primarily for his previous life as an FM pop radio poster boy. That’s just the way it is, I suppose, but Hornsby seems well prepared for the probable brickbats, his balding middle-aged mug affixed with a justifiably affable grin in the tray card snapshot. Bassist Christian McBride and drummer Jack DeJohnette are about as good as it gets in terms of versatile high profile sidemen. They defer to Hornsby’s druthers on a program stacked toward canonical covers. Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, Davis’ “Solar” and Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” don’t suggest much in the way of derring-do song choices, but they get the job done. McBride and DeJohnette could play these tunes in their sleep. Rather than limn them to the letter they decide to have a little fun with the overly familiar.

Hornsby is obviously outclassed in terms of technique, but he doesn’t let it faze him, holding on to some of the ticks and licks that were signatures on his millions-selling pop songs while improvising convincingly, if at times, a bit woodenly. On the previously unrecorded Ornette number “Questions and Answers”, tellingly trumpeted as a chief selling point on a sticker plastered to the disc’s shrink-wrap, DeJohnette laces a ghostly drum machine beat between his acoustic rhythms. It’s a distracting trope and one that he employs with annoying frequency. Hornsby’s originals, of which there are two, are fairly faceless postbop prototypes built with heads that don’t reside in the memory much beyond the time it takes to negotiate them. The main event here is hearing McBride and DeJohnette flex muscles and tussle, but Hornsby has nothing to be ashamed of with his first “bonafide” jazz entry. If there’s to be a sophomore outing here’s hoping he opts to shed some more and use the seasoned chops as a means to explore less trammeled territory. Returning full circle to those scowling purists sharpening their axes to fell the fledgling Hornsby jazz tree, to quoth Bruce the bard: “Don’t you believe them.”

~ Derek Taylor