Orphans Bysantium

A pianist who has always given more attention to the shape of a melody than to the condition of his outward career, musicians' musician Bobo Stenson is suddenly ubiquitous. War Orphans finds Stenson, Anders Jormin and Jon Christensen in peak form as they rove freely through an intriguing repertoire that includes two Ornette Coleman tunes, Ellington's "Melancholia", a beautiful Cuban love song by Silvio Rodriguez, and original material by bassist Jormin and the leader.

Orphans is the most unwieldy Tom Waits collection yet. Packaged in a Cibachrome-tinted box are three discs containing 56 songs total. It claims 30 new tunes, but a mere 14 can be found on other records - six others have to be hunted for while the remainder have shown up in various incarnations. This crazy thing began as a collection of outtakes, rarities, soundtrack tunes, and compilation-only cuts - some of which survive here in new form, including tracks from the Ramblin' Jack Elliot tribute, the Bridge benefit, and two Ramones covers, to name a few. In other words, the first conception was as a hodgepodge collection of attic material. Waits checked out the tune selection as it was and said something like "nah, bad idea; this would suck"…