*** Ray Barretto & New World Spirit + 4

PORTRAITS IN JAZZ AND CLAVE

(RCA Victor)

Latin percussionist Ray Barretto has plenty of chops and has proved his talent on scores of perfectly competent Latin jazz albums over the decades. It is all to the good that he wanted to stretch out on his new label, and the addition of big guns like saxman Joe Lovano, trombonist Steve Turre, and guitarist Kenny Burrell makes this arguably the best album of his long career.

The opening selection, a bizarre Latinizing of a seemingly resistant Duke Ellington tune, the dirge-like "The Mooche," is a bracing surprise. Breakneck drumming counterpoints horns that are carrying the melody in a lazy, hazy fashion. The Latin jazz treatments of Thelonious Monk ("I Mean You") and Wayne Shorter ("Go") are more conventionally synchronized, but solos by Lovano and Turre put some surprising spice into the program. Most ambitious is the jazz treatment of music by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, who's best known to jazz fans for providing the infrastructure for the Miles/Gil Evans Sketches of Spain.

-- Norman Weinstein