Charlie Haden and Kenny Burrell, Jazz Lions in Winter

Two strong new albums by Southern California-based jazz masters explore some of their abiding passions and concerns. The latest posthumous release by bass legend Charlie Haden, who died at the age of 76 in 2014, is a gorgeous and deeply melancholy outing on the Impulse! label by his 12-piece Liberation Music Orchestra, “Time/Life (Songs for the Whales and Other Beings)."

Liberation Music Orchestra albums are kind of like the Halley’s Comet of jazz, blazing across the scene infrequently and appearing as a harbinger of catastrophe. Haden had already helped change the face of jazz through his work with the epochal Ornette Coleman quartet when he released his first album as a leader in 1969, “Liberation Music Orchestra,” a collaboration with pianist, composer and arranger Carla Bley, one of the great creative partnerships in American music. Every decade or so since then, they’ve teamed up for another LMO project, timing that coincided with the advent of Republican presidencies (Haden was an outspoken leftist).

The first CD I ever reviewed for The California Report was the last LMO release, 2005’s “Not In Our Name,” the bassist’s response to the war in Iraq, and many of the same musicians from that memorable session return for this outing (the band’s fifth release).

Inspired by Haden’s commitment to environmentalism, "Time/Life" opens with Bley’s sumptuous arrangement of Miles Davis’ “Blue in Green” and closes with Haden’s epic “Song for the Whales,” which keys on an eerie, keening arco solo by the bassist that evokes the cries of the aquatic mammals. Those tracks were recorded in concert in Belgium in 2011, while Bley recorded the three central pieces after Haden’s death with the same exceptional cast (and her longtime partner Steve Swallow on bass).

The album’s centerpiece is a vivid reworking of “Silent Spring,” a piece Bley wrote for the classic 1967 Gary Burton album “A Genuine Tong Funeral,” which made her reputation as a composer. Opening with a spare, beautifully considered guitar solo by Steve Cardenas, the piece builds to a breathtaking trumpet lament by Michael Rodriguez that seems to mourn the degradation of nature while celebrating its wonder.

If the mood on "Time/Life" is baleful, guitarist Kenny Burrell sounds like he’s having the time of his life on "Unlimited 1," which was recorded live at Catalina's in Hollywood. Joining forces with Charley Harrison and Bobby Rodriguez’s Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra Unlimited, which brings together a top-shelf cast of Los Angeles players, Burrell uses the ensemble as a showcase for his various musical interests.

The set opens with a big brassy arrangement of Oliver Nelson's standard "Stolen Moments," arranged by Berkeley-raised tenor saxophonist Hitomi Oba (who studied with Burrell at UCLA). He spreads solos around generously, but Burrell is the primary voice and he sounds great at 85, even providing vocals on several tracks, like a brisk and ebullient version of Duke Pearson and Oscar Brown Jr.'s standard, "Jeannine."

One of jazz’s most prolific and esteemed guitarists, Burrell has recorded more than 100 albums as a leader and hundreds more as a sideman with jazz legends such as Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Jimmy Smith and Bill Evans. Famously cited by Duke Ellington as his favorite guitarist, he came up on the vibrant post-World War II Detroit scene and made an auspicious recording debut with Dizzy Gillespie in 1951.

He’s maintained an improbably high standard throughout the decades, and if “Unlimited 1” isn’t essential Burrell, it’s a fine representation of a jazz lion in winter who’s still a sleek and soulful improviser (for stone cold classic Kenny Burrell, check out 1965's "Guitar Forms" or 1963's "Midnight Blue").

A pioneering jazz educator and longtime UCLA professor -- he taught the first American university course ever offered on the music of Duke Ellington back in the 1970s -- Burrell delivers a welcome dose of Ellington with a Billy Strayhorn medley threading the ballad "Passion Flower" with the immortal theme "Take the 'A' Train." The show closes with Mercer Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” featuring the blues-steeped vocals of Barbara Morrison.

Let’s end with a shoutout to the veteran arranger Buddy Bregman, who died recently at the age of 86. He dropped out of UCLA to work with impresario Norman Granz’s new label Verve, and was one of the mainstays of the golden age of Hollywood studio sessions, collaborating with singers like Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Sammy Davis Jr., Fred Astaire and, most memorably, Ella Fitzgerald.