Deep In The Blues

Putting Charlie Haden's upright bass — the man who anchored Ornette Coleman's free-jazz revolt — underneath James Cotton's harmonica turns a Chicago blues session into something with an unfamiliar bottom end.

Haden doesn't slap or hurry; he lets whole notes hang and breathe under "Worried Life Blues," so the song walks instead of stomps and Cotton's harp has room to bend against nothing but air and Joe Louis Walker's guitar. That patience is what makes the raunch land harder when it comes — "Play With Your Poodle" grins wider because everything around it is played so deliberately. Cotton's voice, roughened by the decades, sells "Down at Your Buryin'" as threat and joke at once. The trio never treats acoustic restraint as a museum piece; they use it to make old material sound like a conversation caught live.