Barbary Coast

Named for the waterfront district of San Francisco that spent a century as one of the most notoriously lawless stretches of urban America — a place of sailors, opium dens, crimps, and disappearances — this Zawinul composition carries that atmosphere in its bones without ever becoming theatrical about it. The tempo is unhurried, deliberate, with a slow-rolling groove that suggests something waiting rather than moving. Wayne Shorter's soprano saxophone is at its most seductive here, playing with a sinuous quality that slithers between notes rather than landing on them cleanly, and the spaces he leaves are as loaded as the notes he plays. Zawinul's keyboard voicings have a saltwater murkiness — harmonically ambiguous chords that keep the listener's sense of stability pleasantly off-balance. There is a danger in the music, but it is the soft-edged kind: the danger of being lured somewhere, of finding a place more interesting than the one you came from and forgetting to leave. The rhythm section keeps its own counsel, neither driving forward nor pulling back, simply maintaining a pulse that feels ancient. This is late-night music for unfamiliar neighborhoods, for that particular alertness that comes when the setting is slightly beyond your experience and your senses have sharpened in response.