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Pat Metheny Group: The Way Up
by Alain Londes
City traffic noises briefly lead into an inviting, fast introduction. Such is the opening of the Pat Metheny Group's most recent release.
Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays, the original Group's brain trust, have created a 68-minute suite that encapsulates a number of stylistic devices introduced throughout the history of their collaboration. Steve Rodby continues to lay the grounding with his acoustic and electric bass, as well as cello. Trumpeter Cuong Vu and drummer Antonio Sanchez continue ... Continue ReadingPat Metheny Group: The Way Up
by Mark Sabbatini
Pat Metheny hasn't exactly been on a roll lately. The guitarist typically alternates safe and daring work, satisfying mainstream hordes while reassuring purists he's still among the modern masters. But lately it's been more mellow and less leaving the nest, and some of it sounds long in the tooth.
So it's refreshing that, even though The Way Up is another album by the mainstream- oriented Pat Metheny Group, it contains just four tracks, three of which are between ...
Continue ReadingPat Metheny Group: The Way Up
by Doug Collette
Titled with his customary forward-thinking optimism, The Way Up is Pat Metheny's first project for Nonesuch Records. For all its intricacy, this ambitious group endeavor, a single extended composition in four parts, brings to mind the earliest, and comparatively simpler, works of the guitarist composer when he first established a four-piece band under his own name back in 1978.
The lyricism that has drawn and retained listeners for close to thirty years appears in abundance here, but there's also plenty ...
Continue ReadingThe Way Up
by John Kelman
Like him or not, the one thing you cannot accuse guitar icon Pat Metheny of is complacency. Over the course of his thirty-year career he has tackled everything from the Midwestern folk sensibility of New Chautauqua to the free-spirited interplay of his collaboration with Ornette Coleman, Song X. But as significant and diverse as his solo efforts have been, the project that has been most near and dear to his heart has been Pat Metheny Group, now in its 27th ...
Continue ReadingThe Pat Metheny Group: The Way Up
by AAJ Staff
From the opening sounds of traffic in Manhattan to the ascending coda, the Pat Metheny Group's The Way Up is a penetrating 68-minute statement about the search for meaning.
Pat Metheny has been a clear voice in jazz since the release of his classic treatise, Bright Size Life, produced when he was 22 years old. The spoken word of a young man in love with his life, it promised of yet untold eloquence. His brilliance has not remained ...
Continue ReadingAnna Maria Jopek and Friends with Pat Metheny: Upojenie
by Mark Sabbatini
How many Pat Metheny fans know “Tam. Gdzie Nie Siega Wzrok" is one of his most popular songs?
I'm willing to bet less than one fan in 1,000 recognizes the title, yet nearly any listener would immediately recognize it as one of most intriguing versions of “Follow Me" (from Imaginary Day ) he's performed.
That's the lure of Upojenie, an album recorded in Warsaw by the guitarist with a group of Polish musicians led by singer ...
Continue ReadingPat Metheny / Kenny G: The Jazz Soul of P.D.Q. Bach
by Jack Bowers
In a move that has left the jazz world buzzing and their legions of fans traumatized in shock and disbelief, erstwhile polar opposites and outspoken adversaries Pat Metheny and Kenny G have recorded together for the first time, choosing as their common ground the singularly uncommon music of the opprobrious nineteenth/eighteenth century composer P.D.Q. Bach.At a media event held to trumpet the partnership (Pat’s brother, Mike, played lead trumpet) the former combatants were in a conciliatory mood. “It’s ...
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