Edward Hopper cover art, jazz guest stars, careful liner notes – Harbor Lights radiates taste, smarts and ambition. Alluding to Bill Evans and the ECM releases of the Seventies, to the Drifters and folk music, Bruce Hornsby's fourth album is his most musicianly work and perhaps his most personal. Hornsby has become a synonym for class; upwardly mobilizing artists from the Dead to Don Henley and Dylan, his industry is that of a true player, open to a remarkable variety of sounds. He's been a radio titan, too ("The Way It Is," "Mandolin Rain"), but with his scorn for trends and image, an unlikely one for the late Eighties. Hornsby was the rare hitmaker who backed into the spotlight – the music itself was his story.

And that story now is open-ended, discursive. Gigging with the Grateful Dead has provoked him to jamming, but jamming of a singular precision. Retaining only drummer John Molo from his band the Range, Hornsby adds bassist Jimmy Haslip of the Yellowjackets to a jazz-based piano trio. Branford Marsalis sits in on sax, Pat Metheny and Jerry Garcia on guitar, Phil Collins on percussion and vocals, and if such ballads as "Fields of Gray" and "The Tide Will Rise" recall the high-gloss grace of Hornsby's Top Forty past, the greater part of Harbor Lights boasts freer melodies, canny shifts in tempo, improvisatory space. Whether executing Garth Hudson-like organ or Keith Jarrett piano turns, Hornsby dazzles as a soloist; Molo's power, too, is impressive. Studies of raffish characters ("Rainbow's Cadillac," "Long Tall Cool One") alternate with mood pieces ("Harbor Lights") and love songs ("China Doll"), each finding Hornsby, easier now in his phrasing, in fine voice.

Spry funk peppered with jazz chords, it's the sound of Harbor Lights that provides its intricate pleasures. Playing this assured is almost a novelty in the age of sampling: By synthesizing choice bits from diverse traditions, Bruce Hornsby delivers something new. (RS 658)

PAUL EVANS