Despite the coleader billing of Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheny, the quintet on Song X sounds like one of the alto saxophonist's early bands with the guitarist as an added starter. Which is probably the way Metheny wanted it – he's taking advantage of his popularity to introduce Coleman, the catalyst in jazz's twenty-five-year push from be-bop to free form, to a larger public.

Metheny has recorded Coleman compositions before, often in the company of erstwhile Coleman sidemen, but this is his first face-off with the master. He rises to the occasion beautifully, even if his synthesized tremolo does create harmonic clutter on the title track and the collectively improvised "Endangered Species" (characteristic Coleman anthems that beg to dispense with harmony altogether in favor of conflated melody and rhythm). Still, even these tracks bristle with excitement, due in no small part to Metheny's readiness to go for broke and his willingness to defer to Coleman. This is not another case of a pop Charlie Tuna hooking up with jazzmen to flaunt his good taste, à la Sting and Branford Marsalis. Despite an approach basically antithetical to Coleman's, Metheny displays keen insight into the jazz demigod's music, whether impersonating a second horn ("Long Time No See"), or jabbing fast counterpoint to a rootsy Coleman violin solo ("Mob Job") or lending an air of prairie melancholy to one of Coleman's patented dirges ("Kathelin Gray"). He even chooses exactly the right moment to lay out behind Coleman's euphoric outburst on "Trigonometry."

As for Coleman, he blows with his customary lyric eloquence and inexorable emotional power. Bassist Charlie Haden, a longtime Coleman associate, and drummer Jack DeJohnette generate irresistible swing in the process of playing hide and seek with the beat, and Coleman's son Denardo, who plays computerized as well as regulation percussion, joins with Metheny to add an attractive electronic overlay to "Video Games" and "Long Time No See."

Ornette's raw fervor might send some of Metheny's yuppie faithful scrambling for cover, but jazz fans will come away from Song X with new respect for Metheny. And jazz technophobes will be pleasantly surprised that the music Coleman makes with the guitarist is closer in wattage to his albums of the Sixties than to his recent efforts with his electrified free-funk band Prime Time.

Given how infrequently Coleman shows up on record, the release of two albums within a matter of months amounts to a bonanza. Opening the Caravan of Dreams is a harmolodic update – Coleman's first musical statement on the correlativity of rhythm and dissonance since the delightful Of Human Feelings (recorded in 1979 but not released until three years later). Like its predecessor, this new album offers cacophony you can dance to, in the form of multilayered riffs that strike a perfect balance between the elemental and the abstract. But Caravan of Dreams has a big edge since it's a recording of a 1983 concert from a week-long tribute to Coleman in Fort Worth, Texas (his birthplace); what the six performances on the LP lack in focus, they more than make up for in fire and good-natured sprawl – in particular, the loping "Sex Spy," far superior to a 1978 duet version with Haden, which seemed definitive at the time.

Opening the Caravan of Dreams is available from Caravan of Dreams Productions, 312 Houston Street, Fort Worth, TX 76102. (RS 478/479)

FRANCIS DAVIS