THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION

By JAY COCKS

"You've got to hear this," Charlie Haden said, passing across the silvery CD as if it were a communion wafer. "Man, you got to hear this. It's like going to church." The music came on, cool and reverent: Hank Jones playing It's Me, O Lord (Standing in the Need of Prayer). If church were as blissful as this--if it swung like this--there would be a worldwide conversion.

Haden had religion. He had the history, he had the soul, and as he listened to Jones' serene and supple piano, his eyes closed, his head went back and he started playing a bass line. Without his instrument. Scatting, scampering around the surprising progression of Jones' notes, raising a joyful noise.

This was in the early summer of '94, at a friend's apartment, and Haden, a man with reverence for tradition and impatience with stasis, had already laid down plans for recording an album of sacred songs with Jones, a kind of informal jazz eucharist that has recently been released by Verve as Steal Away. It's not only unique in the jazz canon--two instrumental Olympians playing spirituals, hymns and folk tunes with improvisational brio and numinous respect for sources and traditions--it's also uniquely beautiful. Like all the best sacred music, it is a sensual tribute to the unblemished secrets of the soul.

It's Me, O Lord is there, in a version that transcends even Jones' rapturous solo. Steal Away and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot are played with a kind of hushed delicacy, much as written, although Haden says there were "a couple of times we looked at each other and said, 'Forgive us, Lord, for that flatted 13th.'" They blow away all the encrusted sanctimony from We Shall Overcome, rediscovering the splendor of its pride, and find a perfect ecumenical grace in Danny Boy. "Initially I was a little apprehensive about the format," Jones admits. "We were unsure as to how people would accept spirituals played in the same context as bebop or modern jazz." Playing off each other, against and around each other, flirting with the melody and firing the spirit, he and Haden prove that it's not the context that counts as much as the soul.

"Listening to Hank Jones play--it's like listening to an orchestra," Haden says. An orchestra full of sly virtuosity that finds in its past not only inspiration but also renewal. Jones is 76, playing at the top of his form and calling on a whole lifetime of talent. Born in Detroit, where he would go to meeting at the Michigan Baptist Church, Jones ultimately chose to follow the jazz life, a through route from home to perdition. "My father," he recalls, "thought jazz was the music of the devil." The devil took him straight to the Apple; took his younger brothers too. Elvin Jones became a wizard drummer; Thad, a superb horn player.

In New York, Hank became a protege of Art Tatum's, carrying the great blind pianist's music satchel from gig to gig. Jones developed his own keyboard style, taking some of Tatum's breakneck invention and adding a measure of cool, a distinctive touch of romantic reserve to offset the fire of what came, in time, to be called bebop. Jones was also a sideman for Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday; he went to school with the best.

Haden first caught Jones on recordings, playing behind Parker. Haden had worked up a keen ear for all kinds of music from early on. His parents were country musicians who appeared at the Grand Ole Opry and started their boy performing at age four. Some Sundays in Springfield, Missouri, Haden's mother would take him on outings to the African-American church. "We would quietly go in the door after everybody and sit in the back and listen to the music," he says. "That was one of the most moving experiences of my young life."

Haden put down his professional roots in Los Angeles, winning fame first as a session man, then as creator of two formidable West Coast jazz groups, the Liberation Orchestra and Quartet West. He met Jones three years ago, when both did guest turns on an Abbey Lincoln-Stan Getz album. Then, at a Verve Records anniversary celebration at New York's Carnegie Hall, Haden, with a little trepidation, cornered the dapper pianist backstage, proposing that they do an album of spirituals together. Jones agreed simply by starting to suggest song titles.

All 14 tracks on Steal Away were laid down in two days. "Whatever we accomplished on the record was a natural approach each of us brought to the recording," Jones says. "We didn't try and do anything different than what we had already done in our experience." From that experience they've drawn some history and autobiography and a little private mediation, set them deep in the spirit, then drawn them out into a jazz pilgrimage. Black spirituals, white hymns, folk tunes from Ireland and French Canada: Jones and Haden give them a singular unity and immediacy. This isn't just great music. It's healing music.

--With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York