Charlie Haden With Michael Brecker Featuring Brad Mehldau And Brian Blade - American Dreams (2002)

Tracklist

01. American Dreams 04:52
02. Travels 06:46
03. No Lonely Nights 05:18
04. It Might Be You 04:55
05. Prism 05:21
06. America The Beautiful 05:23
07. Night Fall 05:07
08. Ron's Place 07:30
09. Bittersweet 06:46
10. Young And Foolish 05:38
11. Bird Food 07:31
12. Sotto Voce 05:12
13. Love Like Ours 04:25

personnel :

Charlie Haden - bass
Michael Brecker - tenor saxophone
Brad Mehldau - piano
Brian Blade - drums

This overly long quartet-plus-strings session is Charlie Haden's paean to an ideal America, made during a time that was ripe for such reflections. The band, with Haden on bass, Michael Brecker on tenor, Brad Mehldau on piano, and Brian Blade on drums, is unassailably strong. But listeners could have lived without the ear-candy sheen provided by the 34-piece orchestra, arranged primarily by Alan Broadbent, with additional contributions from Jeremy Lubbock and Vince Mendoza. (Broadbent and Mendoza also penned charts for Jane Monheit's In the Sun, released two weeks earlier.) Aside from outright banalities like "America the Beautiful" and "It Might Be You" (yes, the Stephen Bishop lite-radio hit), there are some saving graces, like Keith Jarrett's "Prism" and "No Lonely Nights," Mehldau's "Ron's Place," and Haden's two originals, "American Dreams" and "Nightfall." But Pat Metheny's "Travels" goes soggy without its Midwestern guitar twang, and Ornette Coleman's "Bird Food," one of only three tracks not to feature the orchestra, is so wildly out of place that its impact is somehow diminished -- notwithstanding a vivid pedal-point interlude about six minutes in.~David R. Adler