Bruce Hornsby displays his range

You think you know Bruce Hornsby. "The Way It Is," "The Valley Road." Led a band called the Range. Pop singer, piano player who likes to take the occasional solo. You think you know what he's all about.

You don't know Bruce Hornsby.

First off: He's not a pop musician. Two semesters at Berklee College of Music. Graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in jazz. Thought about moving to New York and playing gigs in dark, smoky clubs five nights a week. Problem was, he would buy records by John Coltrane and Joni Mitchell, and he found himself listening more to Joni than to Trane.

"I liked jazz a lot," he says over the phone from his home in Williamsburg, Va. "But I loved songs more."

So he got a band together, and lo and behold he scored a monster hit with "The Way It Is." Problem solved.

Follow-up records came. More hits. Wrote a little song for Don Henley called "The End of the Innocence"; you might have heard it. Calls from Bob Dylan, Roger Waters, the Grateful Dead -- come play in our band. Everybody wanted him. Even did a bluegrass album with Ricky Skaggs earlier this year. Jazz was sidelined, became a hobby, something he did at home.

Sure, OK, he did things here and there. Recorded with jazz guitarist Pat Metheny. Played with bassist Charlie Haden and saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Won a Grammy with saxophonist Branford Marsalis for "Barcelona Mona," a piece composed for the 1992 Olympics. Jammed with Ornette Coleman. But these were detours.

The jazz nagged at him.

"It's always been in there," he says. "It's always been an influence."

He'd run into his jazz friends now and again. Would bump into drummer Jack DeJohnette here, bassist Christian McBride there. They'd bring up the idea of getting together.

"Whenever I'd run into Christian, he'd say, 'When's the gig?' And I'd run into Jack, and he'd say, 'When we gonna do something?' " Never happened.

Two years ago, Hornsby went to see pianist Keith Jarrett's standards trio at Carnegie Hall. Stopped by to chat with DeJohnette after the show. "He said 'When we gonna do something?' again. I said, 'Well, I've lost your number.' He said, 'Here's my number. Now you have no excuse.' I said, 'Well, now my only excuse is fear.' He said, 'Well, when you get over that, give me a call.' "

He got over it.

They managed to get together over several days in April 2006 at Hornsby's house. The result: the miraculous, mind-blowing jazz album "Camp Meeting," which came out this week. It is a piano trio playing without boundaries, without expectations, and with a rare sense of complete freedom and abandonment. There are originals, and there are standards and bop classics, but they are rendered frighteningly new -- Coltrane's "Giant Steps" with the familiar melody twisted around, Thelonious Monk's "Straight, No Chaser" all funked up. This is Hornsby like you've never heard him, and it is piano-driven jazz like you rarely hear it -- unrestrained, fresh, original. Saturday they'll be at the JVC Jazz Festival in Newport, R.I., playing on the main stage.

But, OK, fine. Bruce Hornsby in a jazz trio. Still: Why wait till you're 53 years old to try it?

"I never had the time to really deal with it, and I didn't feel that conceptually I really had it together," he says. "It's a pleasant problem. I've had a really busy career. I finally decided to carve out the time. But I come at this with deep humility. I don't consider myself to be good at this. Jazz is a lifelong study, and I haven't been doing it on a lifelong level since college."

So . . . is this a one-off project or the start of a new career for Bruce Hornsby?

"I would hope that it's not a one-off," he says. "But I will not make another record until I have 10 pieces of music that are special in their own way, that have a conceptual reason for being. Sure, I could make a record of me playing 10 interesting standards I know. But that has no reason for being."

It's been a long, strange trip for a guy who'll forever be known for one of the biggest pop songs of 1986. He doesn't expect to play "The Way It Is" -- even as a jazz instrumental -- when he hits the stage at Newport. Even if he were to play it, he says, it wouldn't sound anything like the version we all know from the radio. That, too, would have no reason for being, he says.

"I've had an odd career, in a sense, in that I came out and had all these hits, so there are people who think they know who I am," says Bruce Hornsby. "But they really have no idea."

Bruce Hornsby (with Christian McBride and Jack DeJohnette) performs Saturday at the JVC Jazz Festival-Newport at Fort Adams State Park, Newport, R.I. Tickets are $70. Call 866-468-7619 or go to festivalproductions.net or ticketweb.com.