Thanks!Originally Posted by pb2015
Thanks!
Travels, Letter From Home, Still Life Talking, Imaginary Day, The Road To You, Bright Size Live, American Garage
Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) w Charlie Hayden
IMHO you can go wrong with a couple of his experimental albums, and some work can be pretty sugar coated.
But.
He and his bands have produced some of the most beautiful sounds. And challenging material.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-- Aristotle
Nostalgia, you know, ain't what it used to be. Furthermore, they tells me, it never was.
“A Man Who Does Not Read Has No Appreciable Advantage Over the Man Who Cannot Read” - Mark Twain
Yes to both of those! Secret Story is a masterpiece.
I would also recommend Letter From Home -- my favorite PMG album, and possibly favorite jazz fusion disc of all time.
Zero Tolerance For Silence
and after that everything else.
These two, and the eponymous Pat Metheny Group album. 'San Lorenzo' on there is one of my favourite pieces of music by anyone, as is 'It's For You' from ..Wichita...
Nice to see American Garage mentioned, that one's often overlooked. I like it just as much as the first PMG album.
I particularly like his ECM work, myself.
However, the first album I heard by him was the Geffen album Secret Story, which I loved.
wiseass
The Way Up
https://stores.portmerch.com/patmeth...his-place.html
As noted, shipping cost is very high.
Yeah, that may be his real masterpiece, but the only downside to TWU is that you really have to eat the whole pizza in one sitting - it's hard to have just a few slices. But it gots real good pepperonis, real good sauces, real good cheese, real goods crust, reals good meatballs, and real good fungus things.
If it isn't Krautrock, it's krap.
"And it's only the giving
That makes you what you are" - Ian Anderson
Quite the Pat Metheny fan here. The new one's on tonights shopping list for certain
When live recordings of the piece turned up, I got in the habit of breaking TWU into around 10 tracks to burn to disc, as I used to do back in 2005.
He's been exploring so much mainstream jazz over the past few years. How many of you wish there was The Way Up - Part 2?
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A gentleman is defined as someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't.
I love the title track. I worked hard and transcribed it for piano and I just love playing it.
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A gentleman is defined as someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't.
BINGO!
We are the grandchildren of apes, not angels
But only we are gifted with the eyes to see
On days without FEAR, when our heads are clear
That angels, we could be
(Marillion 2016)
No one’s mentioned it so I gotta put in a recommendation for First Circle. I really love that album.
I always come back to Imaginary Day, which seems the most "proggy" of the PMG albums.
I think I prefer the ECM albums because they are produced in more of a 'light touch' way than the Geffen albums. Just IMHO.
Yes!! And if you're the kind of music lover who responds to live performance videos, This one will blow your mind: https://www.amazon.com/Pat-Metheny-G...SIN=B000I5XDWO
David
Happy with what I have to be happy with.
The best of his best: "Pat Metheny Group" from 1978 on ECM and "The Way Up" from 2005. They are completely different albums and display the diversity and evolution of their musical ideas. For me, the PMG release is Pat and Co. at their pinnacle, especially on "San Lorenzo", which is my favorite cut of all time from Pat. On "The Way Up", I hear something akin to progressive fusion combined with standard jazz sensibilities. The critics labeled it as a showcase for the bands improvisational capabilities and gave it high marks. I have never heard anything like that album, in the category of Jazz music. It blows me away every time I listen to it; I always hear something new and unique when I put on those 4 tracks.
As stated in my post above, you've got my vote for TWU, part 2. I'm not sure that it is possible for him to do that, though, without rehashing the greatness of the original. I can't fathom how you could improve upon it, or even expand it to reach a higher plane of musical expression. However, I would certainly like to see him tackle it in the future.
As a side note, I used to jog around the track at Lee's Summit High School and every time I did so, I relived the music for his first few albums in my head. The school still honors him from time to time with throwbacks to his days attending that school. The small town of Lone Jack Mo is just down the highway a bit, where he formed some of his early meditative musings.
More likely, as many do, would be to use local orchestras, as the coat of transporting, accommodating, feeding & paying an orchestra is usually pretty cost-prohibitive.
John Kelman
Senior Contributor, All About Jazz since 2004
Freelance writer/photographer
Really? Unity Band/Group were not, at least to my ears, mainstream jazz; nor was Tap, Orchestrion or the two “live” Unity & Orchestrion sets. Sure, his trio work is largely mainstream-oriented, but more from form than function. But beyond that, I can’t agree with that assessment...
Last edited by jkelman; 11-16-2019 at 12:41 PM.
John Kelman
Senior Contributor, All About Jazz since 2004
Freelance writer/photographer
PM on his new album....
"From This Place is one of the records I have been waiting to make my whole life. It is a kind of musical culmination, reflecting a wide range of expressions that have interested me over the years, scaled across a large canvas, presented in a way that offers the kind of opportunities for communication that can only be earned with a group of musicians who have spent hundreds of nights together on the bandstand.
Add to that the challenge of all new music and the spontaneous response it generated, channel it all through the prism of large scale orchestration and unexpectedly, From This Place becomes something that advances many of my central aspirations as a musician.
Over the several years that preceded this project, I took the core quartet at the heart of this recording around the world, presenting an evening of music focused entirely on earlier compositions. Until then, virtually every tour I had ever done was centered around the new music of whatever record was current at that time, with a few pieces from previous eras sprinkled in along the way.
By that time, I was several hundred compositions in and had never really stopped to take a look back. The idea of gathering together a unique group of extremely talented players, each with their own relationship to my general area of work was appealing to me, particularly the idea of identifying and presenting the tunes that could be malleable enough in their hands to re-visit as a launching pad for our collective skills and interests as improvisers.
With my longtime collaborator on drums, the brilliant Antonio Sanchez, the exciting new pianist Gwilym Simcock joined by Linda May Han Oh, one of the most important new musicians on the New York scene in recent years, I had a formidable group of musicians. They were all prepared in every way to address that older music in ways that I knew would be exciting and interesting.
What was supposed to be a relatively short tour kept getting extended by popular demand, eventually turning into several years worth of performances across the globe - while becoming one of the most fun and satisfying groups I have ever had on the bandstand with me.
Parallel to and in the midst of all of this, I also made several extensive duet tours with one of my major heroes in life, bassist Ron Carter. In addition to the thrill of being on the bandstand with Mr. Carter night after night, the rigors of touring also gave us plenty of travel time together. During those many hours spent in cars and planes around the world, I was able to ask Ron all the dozens of questions that I, as one of his biggest fans, ever wanted to ask him.
Near the top of my list was this one; during his later years in the Miles Davis Quintet, arguably the most influential band of the last half of the 20th century, while making classic records like Nefertiti, E.S.P. and so many others, why did their live concerts of that era continue mostly to be the standards that formed most of the sets the band had been playing live in previous years? (All Blues, Joshua, Autumn Leaves, etc.)
Why those tunes, rather than the new music they were recording?
Mr. Carter explained to me that Miles had a philosophy that he applied to that particular line-up. He wanted that band to develop a code through playing that familiar music night after night together that could then later be applied to the creation of a new way of playing together in the studio. A common language that would combine the familiarity that the players had with each other through playing those older tunes with the freshness of what new compositions might offer in the studio, creating the best of both worlds.
A light bulb went off over my head.
I had been wanting to record this new band but had made so many guitar/piano/bass/drums quartet records along the way that I found myself searching for a setting to look at what I might do with this group that could be different.
So, why not write a bunch of new music to be presented fresh for the first time in the studio to this band I knew so well? No rehearsals. Let's just go in with a pile of music I would compose just for this crew - an entirely different book from what we had been playing live - and see what happens. The Miles quintet approach.
With that goal in mind, over a relatively short period, I wrote 16 new pieces, set a date for recording, and made sure we had enough studio time to dive into whatever this material might offer. Shortly before the sessions, there were a few pieces that I understood could benefit by gathering some arranging input from Gwilym and Linda to take advantage of their particular gifts within the context of what I imagined those pieces might be suggesting. And I knew from experience that whatever I gave Antonio would be reinvented on the spot by way of his unsurpassed musicality. (In addition to being one of the greatest drummers of his generation, he also has the unique ability to make things happen in a recording studio that puts him in the elite group of players who can genuinely see the studio itself as an extension of their instrument.)
As we launched into the first day of recording, I had another light bulb moment.
As we were playing, I started hearing things in my head that were not there on the page - yet.
I understood quickly that these pieces were demanding orchestration, expansion, and color. Somehow while composing, I had the sense that the nature of what I was working on for these upcoming sessions contained a broader view of something, but I wasn't able to identify it until we actually started recording.
Right away, I started altering the music to allow for that, to make room for this other layer I was imagining, encouraging everyone to leave spaces for other yet undefined details to emerge. What began as a distant vision suddenly blossomed into a central aspect of what makes this record unlike any other that I have done.
As much as folks might describe the sonic language of the avant-garde movement of the Sixties as falling into an identifiable generic sound, I have always regarded the general expansion of creativity of that era in a more ecumenical way.
The stylistic changes that occurred then in our community included not only the obvious examples of individual players utilizing extended techniques on their instruments in new ways, or new types of ensembles, but also the wildly new approaches that technology, particular recording technology, offered.
Multi-track recording allowed for entirely new kinds of music to be made.
It is unlikely that the recordings of the CTI label of that time would likely never be thought of as "avant-garde" by garden variety jazz critics of that (or probably any other) era. But from my seat as a young fan, the idea of an excellent and experienced arranger like Don Sebesky taking the improvised material of great musicians like Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter and weaving their lines and voicings into subsequent orchestration was not only a new kind of arranging; it resulted in a different kind of sound and music.
It was a way of presenting music that represented the impulses of the players and the improvisers at hand through orchestration in an entirely new way. I loved those records.
This will not be the first recording of mine where that equation - record first, orchestrate later - has come up. But it is by far the most extensive one, and I would offer the most organic. From the first notes we recorded, this was the destination I had in mind.
To assist in the next stage, I brought in two of my favorite musicians and two of the most distinguished and advanced arrangers on the scene today; the magnificent Alan Broadbent and the endlessly inventive Gil Goldstein. Having worked with both of them before, I knew them both to be exactly the right fit for what this music was asking for.
I split up the tracks between the two of them based on what material I thought they would each be most inspired by and gave each of them a few directions as to when what and where I was hearing things. In short order, they both produced brilliant charts that enhanced and colored what I had composed while referencing the performances themselves on the tracks they were assigned. (Saving at least one tune and parts of a few others for myself too.) It was thrilling to get their takes on this music and to marvel at the angles and dimensions they both were able to uncover.
If it isn't Krautrock, it's krap.
"And it's only the giving
That makes you what you are" - Ian Anderson
(cont)
Somehow a reference to film scoring and American movie music in general was sitting there just under the surface all along the way. While it is certainly possible to go to eastern Europe to record orchestral music (as is often the case these days for budgetary reasons), I felt that the essence of this music was so American in nature that if it were in any way possible, it needed to be done here in the States - and in Los Angeles in particular. There is a certain quality of rhythmic intensity as well as general excellence produced by the best film scoring studio musicians out there that I have never heard anywhere else.
Thanks to the efforts of the excellent conductor Joel McNeely and his associates, a scenario where we were able to not only get the best players in LA to perform under Joel's exemplary leadership but also to record it all in one of the best sound stages unfolded. We were able to achieve precisely the sound that I was hoping we might be able to get to.
With the orchestral parts recorded, it was clear to me that a few key guests were required to finish. Luis Conte is renowned as the best studio percussionist in the world by artists across the stylistic spectrum for a reason - everything he does fits in a way that you can't imagine how the track might have sounded without him. Gregoire Maret had been a part of one of my earlier bands early in his career and has gone on to become the most sought after harmonica player in music today. They both made fantastic contributions.
On November 8, 2016, our country shamefully revealed a side of itself to the world that had mostly been hidden from view in its recent history. I wrote the piece From This Place in the early morning hours the next day as the results of the election became sadly evident.
There was only one musician who I could imagine singing it, and that was Meshell Ndegeocello, one of the great artists of our time. With words by her partner Alison Riley, they captured exactly the feeling of that tragic moment while reaffirming the hope of better days ahead.
That said, as I approach 50 years of recording and performing, while looking back on all the music I have been involved in, I am hard-pressed to immediately recall in retrospect the political climate of the time that most of it was made in. And if I can, the memories of those particulars seem almost inconsequential to the music itself.
The currency that I have been given the privilege to trade in over these years put its primary value on the timeless and transcendent nature of what makes music music.
Music continually reveals itself to be ultimately and somewhat oddly impervious to the ups and downs of the transient details that may even have played a part in its birth. Music retains its nature and spirit even as the culture that forms it fades away, much like the dirt that creates the pressure around a diamond is long forgotten as the diamond shines on.
I hope this record might stand as a testament to my ongoing aspiration to honor those values."
— Pat Metheny
If it isn't Krautrock, it's krap.
"And it's only the giving
That makes you what you are" - Ian Anderson
Agreed - and Kin and the live album were phenomenal
If it isn't Krautrock, it's krap.
"And it's only the giving
That makes you what you are" - Ian Anderson
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