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By PAUL ZOLLO
 very so often a great album comes into our midst, an album that combines everything that is great about recorded music - innovative songwriting, vigorous vocals, and inventive, unique production. Quite often these albums, especially in the last couple of decades, are ones made by Elvis Costello. This is one of them. It's an extraordinary work, combining a live concert given by EC in The Hague with the Metropole Orkest, a 52-piece jazz orchestra from The Netherlands, with a bonus disc that is a big bonus: a 45-minute suite from Elvis' first-ever full length orchestral work, the stunning "Il Sogno."
With the Orkest, Elvis wondrously revisits many pages from his prodigious songbook, from the classic "Watching the Detectives," though the beautifully melodic and melancholy "Almost Blue," to his great collaboration with Bacharach on "God Give Me Strength." All of these are reinvigorated by the jazzy exuberance of the Orkest, and Elvis' vocals are furiously full of fire. And there's some amazing new material here, starting with the astounding "Hora Decubitis," which was written to a wondrously polyrhythmic and multichromatic composition by jazz legend Charles Mingus, and which, like the whole of the album, crystallizes the volatile spectrum of vibrant musical and lyrical expression inherent in his work. Think Kurt Weill meets Benny Goodman with a dash of the Clash, and you'll get an approximation of what this album's all about. It's another dazzling progression in the career of one of Rock's most enduring and ingenious purveyors.
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