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"One Quiet Night" with Pat Metheny
by Gregory J. Robb
The latest offering from contemporary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny will again put him front and center. Pat Metheny: One Quiet Night (released by Warner Jazz) will feature Metheny on baritone guitar.One Quiet Night is the result of Metheny's solo explorations in one evening of November, 2001. The native of Lee's Summit, Missouri set up a microphone in his home studio and began to play some of his favorite songs with what Metheny describes as a Nashville" tune.
Continue ReadingPat Metheny Group: Speaking of Now
by Jeff Libman
Speaking of Now is burdened by following what may have been the Pat Metheny Group's most creative and exemplary album, Imaginary Day. For the first time in almost 20 years, there is a change in the band's core membership. Gone is Paul Wertico and his crystalline ride cymbal work, as integral to the Metheny sound as the guitarist's own round, ghostly tone. The versatile young Antonio Sanchez takes his place and performs admirably; he doesn't strive to redefine the band's ...
Continue ReadingPat Metheny Group: Speaking of Now
by C. Andrew Hovan
One would be hard pressed to find a jazz-based ensemble that has stayed together for as long as the Pat Metheny Group, which was formed in 1977. Of course, the band is not the sole musical outlet for any of its members and fans wait patiently as much as five years between releases. Still, over the course of eleven studio albums, the Pat Metheny Group has carved a distinctive niche and gained an unparalleled following.
A successor to 1997's Imaginary ...
Continue ReadingCharlie Haden: Nocturne
by Jim Santella
What do you hear in darkness? The little things? Sounds that go unnoticed during the day. Crickets, creaking hinges, softly purring machinery, the hum of automobile traffic, and perhaps a distant television or radio. Night creatures are everywhere; but you don't see them. You hear the same things they hear, though; and it helps you to concentrate on your work.
Charlie Haden's ballad album, Nocturne , follows from his love of film noir. Like his Quartet West, this ...
Continue ReadingMichael Brecker: Nearness of You: The Ballad Book
by David Adler
There comes a time, it seems, when every major-label jazzer has to add a ballads album to his or her discography. That time has come for Michael Brecker, who enlists the formidable Pat Metheny as both producer and guitarist. Along for the ride are three players you may have heard of: Herbie Hancock, Charlie Haden, and Jack DeJohnette. The 11 tracks (divided into two five-track chapters" and a one-track epilogue") are flawlessly executed--practically airbrushed--and as mainstream as can be, but ...
Continue ReadingPat Metheny: Trio > Live
by C. Andrew Hovan
About this time last year the word came through that guitarist Pat Metheny, in typical chameleonic character, had joined forces with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Bill Stewart for a studio album and some touring in Europe and limited parts of the United States. Both Grenadier and Stewart are several years Metheny's senior, but have been mainstays of the contemporary New York jazz arena and could be expected to bring out new facets of Metheny's musical personality. That's indeed what ...
Continue ReadingPat Metheny: Jim Hall & Pat Metheny
by AAJ Staff
Master and apprentice. Predecessor and descendant. Originator and influenced. None of those descriptions of the musical relationship on Jim Hall & Pat Metheny quite sound right. Nor are they accurate. After all, in his own way, Metheny has been greatly original and influential as well. Yet, what we hear on Hall and Metheny's duo album is certainly an affinity. Hall, who always seemed to be unobtrusively present at critical moments the last generation's history ...
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