The cover of Richie Hart’s Timeless shows a clock embedded deep in a block of ice. That’s about as fitting an image for this kind of capable but unimaginative version of “the tradition” as one could imagine. It’s the kind of music that sounds fine as background ambience; but if you’re listening harder, it becomes quite exasperating in its predictability. Hart is not a bad player, but often he unintentionally demonstrates that “tastefulness” and “taste” are not at all synonymous: he has the idiom down smoothly enough, but says very little with it at great length – virtually every track is in the 7- to 8-minute range. The rather stale setlist is dispatched so routinely as to border on somnolence. “Nothing on Six,” the sole original aside from a throwaway blues, hews so close to Wes’s “Four on Six” that it counts more as a minor readjustment than as a fresh melody over its changes.

Timeless is harmless enough stuff, but there are plenty of better guitar-trio albums out there. Recording quality is a little drab, and there are a few unsightly blips and crackles. I was extremely surprised to see that the disc was produced by none other than Michael Cuscuna: it must be considered a rare blot on his generally stellar record.

Dan Rose’s disc, Fountains, suggests he’s a guitarist with altogether more gist and pith. This is his fourth album as a leader, and apparently his first to have a program based on standards rather than originals. Rose ruefully notes that the change of pace has its practical side: “I was trying to get gigs and I’d give somebody my previous cds and they would say, ‘Oh, that’s nice but can you play jazz?’” The setlist here is even more shopworn than that on Hart’s disc, and the almost uniformly gentle tempos and dynamics risk losing the listener’s interest, but Rose is an altogether cannier and more unpredictable soloist. On the slower numbers he throws in enough gentle change-ups to tug the music away from the path of least resistance, while in his solo on “Yesterdays,” the disc’s one uptempo number, he takes some appealing rhythmic risks.

The first few tracks here feel somewhat unfocussed; “Fountains,” a Rose original, has a rather fugitive ambience, for instance, and even the generally good reading of “Autumn Leaves” is marred slightly by Ben Riley’s unwontedly rough shift from brushes to sticks. But this is a CD that, gratifyingly, gets better as it progresses. “Body and Soul” is more than routine, and it’s followed by a memorable Rose composition, a gorgeous but strangely edgy ballad dedicated to Max Roach. “How Deep Is the Ocean” is another strong track, a lilting reading cushioned by Ben Riley’s soft-shoe shuffle at the kit. Rose pulls out the acoustic guitar for one track, a solo reading of “Spring Is Here”; it’s good enough (despite its abrupt ending) to make me wish he’d kept the instrument out for a few more tracks. The album ends with “Untouched,” a laid-back blues with a Hendrix-influenced rising chord progression – the album’s solitary nod to an influence outside the jazz-guitar pantheon.

Though not without flaws, Fountains is a likeable album with its own quiet rewards. Despite its deft handling of standards repertoire, the originals are flavourful enough to make me hope that Rose brings along more of his writing for album number five.

There have been increasing signs lately of jazz musicians’ interest in venturing outside the limits of the so-called Great American Songbook for material, to the point where appearances of songs by Björk, Bob Dylan and Radiohead on jazz discs have become almost commonplace. Still, I wasn’t quite prepared for Pop!, a new disc by the Norwegian guitarist Staffan William-Olsson. To be sure, the Beatles and Bacharach (both represented here) are familiar enough territory for jazz by now. But . . . ABBA and Ricky Martin? There’s also a fair bit of material here that doesn’t register on the map of this particular North American listener, but I imagine has much more resonance (though no less improbability as jazz material) for Norwegian listeners: “Song From a Secret Garden,” by the Irish-Norwegian duo Secret Garden; Lill Linfors’ 1965 hit “Jag Tycker Inte Om Dig”; “Være Trist-Sangen” (which, to judge by a websearch, seems to derive from a children’s show called Karius Og Baktus). Nestling among all this unlikely repertoire are a handful of orthodox jazz standards.

There’s a strong temptation to indulge in knowing irony in this kind of project, the kind of thing that can instantly suck the life and air out of the music. But William-Olsson isn’t a postmodern trickster figure: what’s a surprise and pleasure about this disc is his demonstration of how a quite straightforward approach to this material can sound just right. He’s picked his tunes well, and while he’s tweaked them in order to fit them into the guitar-trio format, they aren’t radically wrenched out of shape: this is not an instance of turning dross into gold, but an altogether subtler alchemy. It’s not too surprising that ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All” – a strong tune, especially once the stilted lyrics are removed – comes off well when scaled-down to these modest proportions: William-Olsson’s version is gorgeously downbeat, delivered with care but with no sentimentality. But that the guitarist can get such good music out of “Livin’ La Vida Loca” – complete with a cheeky bass riff picked out of the original arrangement – counts as nothing short of a minor miracle. “She’s Leaving Home” (from Sergeant Pepper) is one of the album’s high points: a bittersweet waltz that’s graced with a beautifully open-hearted solo. Placed among this kenspeckle batch of material, familiar jazz standards sound newly enlivened. There’s some fingerbusting guitar on “Giant Steps” and a whimsical, very briskly dispatched “Strangers in the Night”, but the standout is a particularly lucid and uncluttered reading of “Body and Soul.”

The disc’s sound-quality, incidentally, is first-rate, and it superbly catches William-Olsson’s crisp, no-tricks delivery. (Bassist Terje Gewelt, I note, is also the owner of Oslo’s Cookie Factory recording studio, where Pop! was cut.) Jazz fans should not be deterred by the CD’s unlikely choice of repertoire: Pop! is as satisfying a jazz-guitar disc as any of recent years.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, April 2003