Hornsby calls jazz "Meeting" with McBride, DeJohnette

08/05/2007 6:03 PM, Reuters
Dan Ouellette

Bruce Hornsby refuses to be counted among the pop stars trying on jazz for size.

"I can see why someone may want to make an album that goes down easy and why a record company would want to put it out because it's a quick way to make a sale," said Hornsby, who makes his all-instrumental jazz debut with "Camp Meeting," due August 7 via Legacy.

"But my record is just the opposite. I have two of the most in-demand jazz artists, Christian McBride on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, playing with me, and we go into plenty of dissonant, stark, angular sonic places," he said. "This is not casual jazz playing; it's been something I've been wanting to do for years."

The genesis of "Camp Meeting" stretches back to Hornsby's jazz studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the University of Miami. But after graduation he gravitated to the songwriter camp as a pianist/vocalist, even though his earliest pop hits, among them "The Way It Is" and "The Valley Road," featured jazz-informed piano breaks. He has also worked through the years with such top-tier jazz artists as Pat Metheny, Branford Marsalis and Wayne Shorter.

After encounters in recent years with Metheny and DeJohnette, who each encouraged him to take the jazz plunge, Hornsby embraced the harmonic jazz language that he "hadn't spoken for years," he said. "I was no longer fluent. I knew I had to go into the woodshed."

The refresher course paid off. Hornsby not only demonstrates his jazz prowess on "Camp Meeting," but also conjures up that rare alchemy with his rhythm team as they contemporize tunes by Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Thelonious Monk (a reharmonized, rumba-flavored "Straight, No Chaser") and Bud Powell (including a hip-hop-spiced take on "Celia"). There's also a never-released Ornette Coleman track, "Questions and Answers," that the iconoclastic saxophonist played for Hornsby years ago.

The CD was recorded in April 2006. Given their hectic schedules, the threesome's next meeting was May 26 at the B.B. King club in New York, to perform a benefit show for the jazz-in-schools organization Jazz Reach.

Backstage at the show, DeJohnette said, "Bruce doesn't lose himself. He approaches jazz with his own sensibility." McBride was likewise impressed and joked, "But I worry about him. I hope he doesn't get too good and make jazz his thing."

Hornsby laughed when told of these remarks. "Rest assured," he said, "I love writing songs and it's great fun to sing."

Reuters/Billboard