Jack DeJohnette joined Manfred Eicher's ECM label in 1972 – at the end of his stint with Miles Davis' Bitches Brew-era bands – when the German label offered the Chicago-raised drummer, composer and pianist the chance to make any music he wanted. The 1978 New Directions quartet was built around his already close ECM partnership with guitarist John Abercrombie, and Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter Lester Bowie seems to have been recruited to bridge territories DeJohnette was already drawn toward merging – Chicago's 1960s free-jazz avant-garde, and the links between jazz, blues and other forms of African-American popular music. The brooding, trumpet-pealing collective conversation of ‘Blue Bayou’ is initially gripping but drifts after a while, the Milesian ‘Where or Wayne’ alternates a funk vibe with free-conversational dialogues, the slowly unfolding ‘Dream Stalker’ pitches delectably shivery guitar figures against Bowie's warm long tones, and ‘One-Handed Woman’ – which starts in free-collective speculations until kicked into swing by Eddie Gomez' flying bass-walk – ends up as a hard-boppish blues jam on a terse, riffy hook. DeJohnette's ‘Silver Hollow’, however, a ballad-structured vehicle for his fine piano-playing, sounds more like music from a John Abercrombie session. New Directions isn't as varied, vivid, inventively written or soloistically cliffhanging as its 1970s DeJohnette successors like Special Edition and Tin Can Alley (with such sax stars as David Murray and Arthur Blythe), but Abercrombie's ethereal guitar glimmers and offhand chord-chimes against his boss's turbulent percussion is almost worth the set.