Word: haden
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...hear this," Charlie Haden said, passing across the silvery CD as if it were a communion wafer. "Man, you got to hear this. It's like going to church." The music came on, cool and reverent: Hank Jones playing It's Me, O Lord (Standing in the Need of Prayer). If church were as blissful as this--if it swung like this--there would be a worldwide conversion...
...Haden had religion. He had the history, he had the soul, and as he listened to Jones' serene and supple piano, his eyes closed, his head went back and he started playing a bass line. Without his instrument. Scatting, scampering around the surprising progression of Jones' notes, raising a joyful noise...
This was in the early summer of '94, at a friend's apartment, and Haden, a man with reverence for tradition and impatience with stasis, had already laid down plans for recording an album of sacred songs with Jones, a kind of informal jazz eucharist that has recently been released by Verve as Steal Away. It's not only unique in the jazz canon--two instrumental Olympians playing spirituals, hymns and folk tunes with improvisational brio and numinous respect for sources and traditions--it's also uniquely beautiful. Like all the best sacred music, it is a sensual tribute...
...Lord is there, in a version that transcends even Jones' rapturous solo. Steal Away and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot are played with a kind of hushed delicacy, much as written, although Haden says there were "a couple of times we looked at each other and said, 'Forgive us, Lord, for that flatted 13th.'" They blow away all the encrusted sanctimony from We Shall Overcome, rediscovering the splendor of its pride, and find a perfect ecumenical grace in Danny Boy. "Initially I was a little apprehensive about the format," Jones admits. "We were unsure as to how people would accept spirituals...
...Listening to Hank Jones play--it's like listening to an orchestra," Haden says. An orchestra full of sly virtuosity that finds in its past not only inspiration but also renewal. Jones is 76, playing at the top of his form and calling on a whole lifetime of talent. Born in Detroit, where he would go to meeting at the Michigan Baptist Church, Jones ultimately chose to follow the jazz life, a through route from home to perdition. "My father," he recalls, "thought jazz was the music of the devil." The devil took him straight to the Apple; took...