Barbican, London
The great double-bassist and band-leader Charlie Haden not only helped invent free-jazz, but has sustained his Liberation Music Orchestra since the 70s as a jazz-and-politics band that doesn't wag a finger at you. A Barbican weekender showcased him, climaxing with a rousing 2011 edition of Liberation Music that included American hornmen Tony Malaby and Michael Rodriguez, and Britons Andy Sheppard and Jason Yarde.
On Saturday, Haden's cool-jazzy Quartet West played three torchy love-songs from his new Sophisticated Ladies album majoring on its distinctively punctilious yet spirited take on instrumental hard-bop. Tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts mixed early Coltrane double-tempo runs with his own cannily expert tone changes; and pianist Alan Broadbent almost stole the show with the richly harmonised, arrangement-like short stories of his improvisations. Liane Carroll's gracefully laconic account of Goodbye was embraced by Watts' hooting sax and Haden's murmuring bass; Melody Gardot's If I'm Lucky was a film-noir soundtrack of femme-fatale gestures, eloquently tremulous vibrato, and dramatic pacing.
Sunday's Liberation Music Orchestra began rather tentatively with the tautly lyrical and then waltzing Not in our Name and Pat Metheny's This Is Not America. Then it discovered its famously exultant, street-band bravura through Carla Bley's arrangements of America The Beautiful (suitably subverting a solemn opening with a free-swinging intervention), Amazing Grace and Going Home. Everybody finally jammed freely on We Shall Overcome. It felt like the start of something rather than the finale, but it's timeless music just the same.