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Charlie Haden,who started his career playing with Ornette Coleman, founded this quartet by his words to play music with atmosphere of movies from 40s. This album is great example how successfully he is doing it.
Another Haden project is experimental big band Liberation Music Orchestra playing leftist mix of post-bop,avant-garde and movies soundtracks. Comparing with them, Quartet West is much more conservative bop (and sometimes post-bop) band, adding classical strings arrangements to their music, and it really sounds as coming from old movies. Happily, all musicians are of high class and you don't feel like listening archive recordings or cheap imitators: playing inside of genre's frames, they sound really inspired and have their personal face.It's interesting, that Haden's bass is more impressive there, than when he plays with Orchestra.
For sure there is not much place for risky moves, this music is more for fans of romantic quality jazz, but if you like such music, you will really enjoy this album. Every song is different, well played and the album in all have strong atmosphere of time and place musicians try to bring to listener.