Consumer Guide Album

Charlie Haden: The Ballad of the Fallen [ECM, 1983]
Voicing the great Spanish and Latin American revolutionary themes that Carla Bley has arranged for a norteamericano liberation orchestra, this testifies to the inestimable beauty and value of cultural autonomy, and by extension cultural cross-fertilization. It's assured but never immodest, elegiac but never maudlin, and Haden's two originals partake of the spirit. Bley's seem inconsequential, though, and the freestyle improvisations (kept in check until side two) generate little pleasure or meaning--except unintended questions about the ultimate relevance of late-capitalist avant-gardism to anti-imperialist struggle, not to mention disparate meanings of freedom in vastly disparate economic situations. A−