FOURPLAY - An Evening with Fourplay - 2 discs

Pianist Bob James is one of a handful of artists that the smooth jazz radio format was created to showcase. Those same sorts of aficionados criticized James when in 1974, after 10 years of playing straight-ahead swing and bop and some avant garde jazz, he made the switch to a plush form of fusion.

He has been accused of selling out, but James insists the opposite was true: He was going in the only direction that didn't look like old ground back then. "I was not happy, even then, playing bebop," he says. "It had already been done and all my heroes did it better than I thought I would be doing it. "Jazz has to keep changing. If it stays the same, it becomes museum music - a reenactment. One of the best and most interesting things about jazz to me is that it always strikes out in different directions." James wanted to eschew the tendency of some artists and fans to cast jazz in amber and protect it from the untutored. "What I liked about earlier forms of jazz was the sense of fun. I wanted to make music that hearkened back to the time when jazz was danced to." James' read on potential listeners was spot-on. He became a hugely successful jazz artist, wracking up numerous gold records.

It was for one of his many solo projects, 1990's "Grand Piano Canyon," that James fatefully recruited the musicians who would come to make up Fourplay: guitarist Lee Ritenour, bassist Nathan East, and drummer Harvey Mason (Larry Carlton replaced Ritenour in the late '90s).

"It was a very magical day," James says. "We all were feeling it. Just because you bring talented people into the studio, doesn't mean you're going to click with them. This was a very special thing. One thing lead to another and we approached an A&R guy at Warner with the idea of forming a group." A supergroup to be precise, comprised of musicians who had all made indelible artistic marks.

Assembling famous musicians for the purpose of collaboration is sometimes like filling a sack with alley cats. But Fourplay sought to eliminate that threat straight off. "From the beginning, we agreed that this would be a group without leaders, a totally democratic outfit. That's why Fourplay has lasted as long as it has, in my opinion. Nobody has the power to pull the group too much one way or another, and everybody has shown the willingness to bend." Largely because of the conservatism of smooth jazz radio, Fourplay bent farther than it ever has for its most recent CD, "Heartfelt". The group flew in the face of prudence and improvised the entire thing in the studio. "We felt like it was the only response we could make," James says. "We needed to make music that was adventurous enough to go beyond the strictures and good enough to cut through and find an audience.

He has projects in the works that would involve a hip-hop DJ and an acoustic trio, respectively. The latter would pay homage to such jazz keyboard legends as Bill Evans and Ahmad Jamal. As James learned after the release of his 1995 acoustic trio recording "Straight Up," there ever exists a danger that he could make himself a man without a country, or a musician without a format. James believes his smooth jazz history caused acoustic jazz programmers to dismiss "Straight Up" out of hand. And smooth jazz programmers, of course, didn't know what to make of it. But James says he can only do what he insists he has always done: be honest with himself. "Once again, you can't please everybody. An artist can't lose sight of his first responsibility: to be faithful to his own vision." This dvd lasted for 2 hours with magnificent display of unbelievable performances.