Sweet Airs

By JAY COCKS

Sounds of early jazz

It should be no surprise that Ry Cooder has come out with one of the year's best records. His easygoing but absolute guitar virtuosity, his witty, always respectful musical curiosity, has established him as a maverick who has set up shop somewhere along the border of pop and folk. No mainstreams for Cooder. He is forever taking off on side trips, turning down dusty country paths to retrieve some old bit of blues or roadhouse folk, sailing off to Hawaii and plucking some sweet melody straight out of the shade.

Even Cooder's fans may be caught off guard by the direction of Jazz, an unexpected anthology of tunes from Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, even the great Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence. As the surprise wears off, though, and the rhythms become less remote, they will hear some of the loveliest, liveliest music in the air. Cooder, with band, gospel quartet and full orchestra, last week performed virtually the entire album at Carnegie Hall.

Because Cooder goes to strange sources, there is a tendency to think of his records as so many vinyl museums run by a slightly eccentric curator. The crucial point, however, is that Cooder's albums are filled not only with respect for the American musical past but also with an immediate and highly infectious joy. The songs on Jazz may be old, but Cooder really blows the dust off them.

The album is a fine bit of syncopated genealogy, running past the sophisticated musical abstractions of Beiderbecke (Flashes, In a Mist) into the knife-edge humor of a minstrel-show song like Nobody and the surprising sleight-of-hand pride in a "coon song" like Shine. The music passes right through Jelly Roll

Morton back to the roots: Caribbean-inflected jazz and gospel music orchestrated for a string and brass band format. These are just the sounds that the first New Or leans jazzmen might have heard when they picked up their instruments.

Cooder is assisted throughout by contributions of some exemplary sidemen, ranging from the alto sax of Harvey Pittel and the impeccable piano of Earl Hines to the mellow, foursquare harmonies of Bill Johnson, once lead singer of the Golden Gate Quartet, perhaps the greatest of all gospel groups. Cooder was going for what he calls "the power, the fleetness" of the old music. He got it fine. Listening to Jazz is a sensual, tonic experience in collective musical memory, a little like having a long closed door in your house blown open by a cool, gentle summer wind.

Jay Cocks

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