Pat Metheny Group
Travels

Pat Metheny guitars
Lyle Mays piano, synthesizers, organ, autoharp, synclavier
Steve Rodby basses
Dan Gottlieb drums
Nana Vasconcelos percussion, voice, berimbau
Recorded July, October, and November 1982
Engineer: Randy Ezratty
Produced by Pat Metheny and Manfred Eicher

If you’ve ever desired a Pat Metheny Group greatest hits album, then Travels is for you. Compiled from the group’s touring activities in 1982, this double set is a must-have. From the glittering lotus of melody that is “San Lorenzo” to the even more effusive “Phase Dance,” the requisite classics are all here. We also get a curtailed, though no less epic, version of “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls,” which here draws out like a long cinematic fade and throws the windows open wide to the band’s boggling sonic purview. And one can hardly help but swoon from the dizzying heights reached by this live version of “Are You Going With Me?” Here the studio version seems but a memory on the path to glory, and finds exuberant life in what is perhaps Metheny’s best solo on record. An absolute affirmation.

Yet the album’s true value comes in the handful of songs exclusive to it. Through these we encounter softer sides of the PMG, each burnished like a different shade of leather. “The Fields, The Sky” is an outstanding place to start. Vasconcelos’s unmistakable berimbau threads a supremely melodious backdrop, while Metheny is at once distant and nearby, winding a slow and organic retrograde around the fiery center within. Vasconcelos is also the voice of “Goodbye,” a forlorn piece of sonic stationery across which Metheny inscribes a most heartbreaking letter toward a ripple of an ending. This pairs nicely with the title track, a laid-back photograph of Americana that is like a rocking chair on the back porch: lulling, and affording an unobstructed vista. Similar strains await us in “Farmer’s Trust,” a slow plunge into an ocean of undriven roads gilded by the whispering of baby birds and the rustling of the leaves that hide them, and in the smoothly paved blacktops of the synth-driven “Extradition” and “Song for Bilbao.” Each of these creeps along like wispy clouds over badlands, spun by keyboardist Lyle Mays into sunset. But it isn’t all drawl, as drummer Dan Gottlieb proves in the invigorating “Straight On Red,” throughout which he provides the perfect springboard for the masterful dialogues of Metheny and Mays.

Travels are what the PMG are all about, and the selfsame album shows us the collective at its finest hour. Those hearing the PMG for the first time will want to start with the studio sessions—and especially Offramp—from which Travels was in part drawn. That way, one can appreciate the enthusiasm of the crowds, and get at least a taste of what it must have felt like to be there among them. With a depth and cleanliness of sound that no band can match, the PMG were a force to be reckoned with, but also one so welcoming that reckoning need never have applied. Theirs is a space where nature and nurture shared the same pair of lungs.

Should posterity ever look back on our age as one of overconsumption, warmongering, and greed, one listen to Travels will prove to them that in our hearts we continued to cherish all that is good and true.

<< Dino Saluzzi: Kultrum (ECM 1251)
>> John Surman: Such Winters of Memory (ECM 1254)

Pat Metheny Group
Offramp

Pat Metheny guitar, guitar synthesizer
Lyle Mays keyboards
Steve Rodby basses
Nana Vasconcelos percussion, berimbau, voice
Dan Gottlieb drums
Recorded October 1981 at Power Station, New York
Engineers: Jan Erik Kongshaug and Gragg Lunsford
Produced by Manfred Eicher

When I was a freshman in high school, our science teacher brought us outside one day to observe a partial solar eclipse. Though he had set up a telescope, provided us with special glasses, and prepared a lecture, my eyes were glued to the ground. As anyone who has experienced a solar eclipse knows, the sun’s light pocks the shadows like Swiss cheese, splashing the earth with countless little crescents of a half-eaten sun.

Eclipse shadows (photo source: Ketchum family blog)

Every note of Pat Metheny’s heavenly soloing on Offramp is its own crescent. His is a talent spun from sunlight, and one that might damage the eyes were its full force to be unleashed at once. Thankfully, we need no special equipment but our own ears to appreciate the intensities he brings to this immortal PMG date, which after the global reach of As Falls Wichita… expanded the compositional and technical prowess of Metheny and keyboardist Lyle Mays to deeper, more serpentine caverns of experimentation.

The Synclavier-enhanced calls of “Barcarole” are the album’s birth cries, each a punctilious footstep into the greater semantic complexities of “Are You Going With Me?” This smooth ride through sun-kissed plains drips with the tears of an unrecoverable past, Metheny’s guitar bellowing like a human trumpet keening at the speed of travel. “Eighteen” inoculates the proceedings with the livewire exuberance in which these musicians so deeply excel. Metheny is light on his feet and infinitely careful about his twists and turns, infusing each with that unmistakable audible grin. Dan Gottlieb kicks up a dust storm in the title song, which also features Metheny in one of his wildest excursions yet. Fractured pianism, an explosive glockenspiel, and Steve Rodby’s fantastic ground lines paint just the right ambiance to allow Metheny to uncork a bottle of some unrepeatable tincture that he seems to have been saving for this very occasion. After this flip and a half, “James” comes across as an acrobatics of its own kind, gracing our cochlea with heartwarming electricity, leaving the wispy skies of “The Bat Part 2” as our only postcard.

Yet all of the above combined barely tickles the underbelly of “Au Lait,” which still stands as Metheny’s most perfect statement. Though something of a carnivalesque on the surface, complete with rolling snare and haunting vocals courtesy of Vasconcelos, one also feels sung to of something far more serious. Whatever that might be, we experience it in real time, every wordless call a way station to where it all began. Metheny is as transcendent as he will ever be, each swing more harmonic than the last over the Joe Hisaishi-like touches from Mays. Oracular and airborne, this is a space we never wish to leave. And on the inside, it never does.

Metheny is a skillful writer who, with heart in place of pen, takes a kernel of an idea and draws every imaginable root before starting in on the leaves. Like a solar eclipse, such music comes all too rarely in any given generation. The beauty of Offramp is that it always feels like the first time. Is your turn signal on yet?

<< Steve Reich: Tehillim (ECM 1215 NS)
>> Ulrich Lask: Lask (ECM 1217)

Pat Metheny Group

Pat Metheny 6- and 12-string guitars
Lyle Mays piano, oberheim synthesizer, autoharp
Mark Egan bass
Dan Gottlieb drums
Recorded January 1978 at Talent Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

There’s no mistaking a Pat Metheny album, and along with running mates Lyle Mays, Mark Egan, and Dan Gottlieb, the experience is unforgettable. From its inaugural moments, the group’s self-titled debut overflows with radiance. Ironically, this was one of the last PMG albums to cross my ears. During my first listen, the seamless combination of guitar and keyboard on “San Lorenzo” in its original guise was enough to show what I’d been missing, for clearly it had already kicked up the ECM ethos up a notch or two. This quiet revelation is further enhanced by the synth lead, gently skating its way across a surface that glitters with an artfully placed autoharp (which presages the sound of Metheny’s Pikasso guitar). Egan’s weighty but smooth bass works magic through the unmistakable lyricism of Mays’s pianism as both are swept favorably along by Gottlieb’s foamy breakers. And there is Metheny himself, whose own waves scorch the shorelines of our expectations with fragrant sunset. There is much to be found here in the way of timeless material, such as “Phase Dance,” another formative cell of the PMG canon. Buoyed by a seesawing bass, effortless soloing from Metheny and Mays scintillates over tight drumming. The wide open spaces of “Jaco,” named for the bassist and early collaborator Jaco Pastorius, veer our attention to a savvy and vigorous funk from which Metheny spins his web with both the grace of a ballerina and the raw emotive power of a blues guitarist. The following tune, “Aprilwind,” is as elegiac as the previous is jubilant. This solo guitar lozenge, wrapped in bittersweet introspection, proves a brief medicinal corrective to the positively acrobatic “April Joy.” A dream within a dream, it awakens our senses to a life renewed. But perhaps none is more uplifting than “Lone Jack,” in which an upbeat narrative flair and superb ground line make for a perfect sling with which to hurtle Metheny’s flames for one arousing final lap around the firmament.

Metheny’s sound has a bright and fluid posture that never fails to work its way into our hearts. No matter what mood we are in before pressing PLAY, we can always be sure of finishing with a smile. This is life-affirming music that stays true to itself no matter what the weather. One sometimes speaks of “desert island discs”—i.e., albums that are indispensable in our listening lives. This is beyond that, for once we hear it we have it with us always.

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>> Keith Jarrett: My Song (ECM 1115)