Down Home And Uptown

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: BRUCE HORNSBY

ALBUM: HARBOR LIGHTS

LABEL: BMG

THE BOTTOM LINE: This infectious, jazz-tinged rock comes straight from Virginia, and from the bottom of a restless heart.

"ON THE FRINGES OF TOWN, BUT also "sort of in the country": that's the way Bruce Hornsby describes the place where he lives and works now, outside Williamsburg, Virginia. He could just as well be describing the infectious, idiosyncratic music he's been recording since the breakthrough success of his first album, 1986's The Way It Is. Hornsby's tunes have a kind of metropolitan melodic sheen, with unexpected breakaway rhythms, and a lyrical simplicity that's straight-spined and deliberately unpolished -- country music with a college education. Or, in the composer's own words, "highbrow Southern rock."

This new album may raise a few brows even higher. Relaxed and intrepid in equal measure, each of the 10 songs on Harbor Lights has pronounced jazz underpinnings. It is, in effect, a swellegant trio record (Hornsby on piano, John Molo on drums, Jimmy Haslip on bass), augmented by annunciations from the superstar firmament: Bonnie Raitt, Jerry Garcia, Phil Collins, Branford Marsalis, Pat Metheny. "The piano solos I played were always more about jazz than rock, single-note lines over a pop context," says Hornsby, a sometime keyboards man for the Grateful Dead. "It was always where I was coming from."

To forestall panic in the pop ranks, however, it should quickly be added that Hornsby is not trying to bring Monk to Top 40. Harbor Lights is a mainstream record, with no apologies offered or required. You can hear traces of the jazz he loves -- Bill Evans, Bud Powell, Keith Jarrett -- but Hornsby's creative instincts are basically populist.

The citizens of Williamsburg scrutinize each new Hornsby record, searching for themselves or looking for the reflection of a neighbor. "Sometimes," he says, "they find themselves. Sometimes much to their chagrin." Talk of the Town is a bluesy riff on interracial romance with a nifty Spike Lee video to match. That may cause some splutters at the Chamber of Commerce, but The Tide Will Rise (with lyrics co-written by younger brother John Hornsby) is a lovely and compassionate evocation of the lot of Virginia fishermen: "Never bowed to no one/ Always went my own way/ Broke down, run aground, but I won't run away/ And the tide will rise."

The closing cut, Pastures of Plenty, has a title that echoes Woody Guthrie, a piano solo that nods heavenward toward Bill Evans, and an extended Jerry Garcia guitar excursion that gives the whole piece the shaggy funk of a Dead concert. Purists in any of those stylistic camps may not care for such a shotgun synthesis, but Hornsby pulls it off with skill, a little underhanded bravado and an utter lack of guile.

The big time has not altered Hornsby's regional perspective. He lives with Kathy, his wife of 10 years, and their twin boys "about 2 1/2 miles from Main Street," in the house where Harbor Lights was recorded. "I could cut a piano track and go in and change a diaper," he reports. "I like the strong rootedness of being there." That's not the usual definition of roots music, but Hornsby's songs aren't usual, and he has a jazzman's improvisatory way with definitions. That's the brightest of Harbor Lights: the one that lights the way to something different.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York