This may be part of the trouble – for most of Broken Arrow, he’s sleepwalking.. In the early Seventies, no country in Europe lionised art-rockers such as Yes and Gentle Giant with quite as much fervour as Italy. With Robert Miles – real name Roberto Concina – that pedestrian sensibility now comes to trance music, or at least to the variant which Roberto chooses to call “Dreamhouse”. “Slip Away”, the best track, offers a serpentine reverie to match the woman who, in the song, “just slipped away/ like a river flowing down”, while “Big Time” finds Neil claiming to be “still living the dream”. But it’s pretty poor stuff, even by the shaky standards of Young’s recent work.

The 10 minutes of “Loose Change” ride a cumbersome Bo Diddley riff, complete with tail-chasing guitar solo. The rest of the songs are little better, but sometimes eerily similar in their sense of balance. “Have you ever been lost, have you ever been found?” he enquires in the quiet acoustic number “Music Arcade”. Well, yes, you think, but you didn’t feel constrained to write a song about it.Musically, the meat of the album is concentrated in its first three songs, which cleave to the classic Crazy Horse style – long, ragged and (hopefully) glorious electric guitar workouts with warts in plain view. “I’m a little bit high, I’m a little bit low,” he offers in “Scattered (Let’s Think About Livin’)” before going on to make similar routine observations along the lines of wrong / right, here / there, up / down, and so on; it doesn’t exactly pinpoint his position with the precision one might have desired. Lyrically, it’s Neil’s equivalent to Dylan’s Under the Red Sky, with the most trite of formulations pursued to the point of tedium and beyond.

Usually, this is with good reason – whatever twists and turns Young makes, this is a band reliable and flexible enough to respond sympathetically, compared with, say, the way Pearl Jam just kept on chugging away through the one- dimensional Mirrorball.
Broken Arrow, however, is no Everybody Knows This is Nowhere Compared to that masterpiece, this is, well, nowhere. Second only to Dylan’s in loyalty, Neil’s fans will always be lenient as far as his Crazy Horse records are concerned. They’ve experienced a few too many odd and sometimes downright eccentric career detours over the years not to feel heartened by the group’s presence. Another Impulse re-issue, Gil Evans’s Out of the Cool from 1961, is beautifully dark and brooding, the colours of the band tending to the melancholy mauve end of the colour spectrum.. As with all of Neil Young’s Nineties output – and at eight or nine LPs, that’s some output – there is a halfway decent album struggling to get out of Broken Arrow, though struggling is perhaps not the right word This is more of a stagger.

As the choir (conducted by Coleridge Perkinson) emote African “ya, ya, ya-yas”, and the band belt out old-school be-bop phrases, with trumpeter Williams and tenor saxophonist Jordan wailing over the top with abandon, you are transported to a world where jazz wasn’t just a question of the appropriate clothing. Listened to while wearing a Seventies Brazil football shirt, it sounds great, and could be one of this summer’s most effective soundtracks.Though it’s completely mad (pairing a strident vocal choir with a jazz septet featuring Clifford Jordan, Richard Williams, Julian Priester and Mal Waldron among the ranks, plus vocalist Abbey Lincoln), the heroic enterprise of Max Roach’s It’s Time, recorded in 1962 and re-released on Impulse CD, is so emphatically swinging, so marvellously funky, and its civil rights message so deeply heart-felt, that it must stand as one of the greatest jazz recordings. A furious percussion work-out, heavy on the whistling, leads into what could be Chick Corea’s Return to Forever in 1972, replete with retro Fender Rhodes piano, and thence on into lugubrious ballads, scat-singing in the mode of Flora Purim, and the kind of de-natured funk that could have come from anywhere. If anything, there is too much respect for the material.Another Latin album, Friends From Rio, on the London-based Far Out Records, takes the fashionable acid jazz sound of Seventies Brazilian samba back to Rio, where the album was recorded, getting old hands such as Marcus Valle and Raul De Souza to perform in a manner they have no doubt long since abandoned in favour of the esperanto of international fusion. Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez’s Panamonk (Impulse), is more than a workaday go at the tunes, and it successfully translates the see-sawing Monkian themes into a Latin idiom without compromising the abiding authorial presence of the composer. As an ostinato left-hand rhythm cues in “Bright Mississippi” – Monk’s variation on “Sweet Georgia Brown” – or the rhythm section vamps a samba opening to “Think of One”, the tunes retain their integrity while Perez gets to demonstrate his command of the keyboard. Even if the performance misses the mark, there’s always the tunes to fall back on.

As a bluesy ensemble bash suddenly resolves itself into calypso harmonies or the midnight- blue colours of mid-period Miles Davis plangency, the listener is apt to sigh and reach for the repeat button.
Of all the stand-by formulas for recording jazz, the album of Thelonious Monk compositions is hard to beat. Though there’s the odd bit of plinky-plonk business, and a touch of rock heroics on the opening track, it’s a stunning set full of odd angles and sudden shifts of perspective. It also uses the drummer-less format of the multi-instrumental quartet with uncommon taste and wit, provoking a sense of real delight. Perhaps the most original guitarist of his generation (he’s 45 and was brought up in Denver), Frisell pioneered the pedal-driven sound of loose- stringed, airy atmospherics that has now entered the everyday vocabulary of the instrument, colouring the productions of Daniel Lanois and U2. Recorded in San Francisco, mixed in Seattle, and sounding like a hi-fi fan’s dream test-recording, the album’s tracks mostly began their life as film-music, and include six themes from an animated version of Gary Larson’s Tales from the Far Side, the cartoonist’s quirkiness matched by Frisell’s strange, mutant-hillbilly style.