Aphonlab.451 net.music utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!sdcarl!sdcattb!sdcatta!phonlab!donn Fri Apr 16 18:18:26 1982 Re: Dan Halbert's Pat Metheny query I like electronic music but I also like jazz and that's how I originally found Pat Metheny. He's made several albums for ECM, a big European jazz label, and most of them are on the jazzy side of jazz-rock. Many of his tunes are light or even hummable and this I suspect is the reason I've been hearing them as the overture to certain local programming on TV, here on the West Coast. He doesn't produce electronic music in the sense that there is a genre of electronic music; "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls" is by far the most "electronic" of his albums and possibly the only one that could trick a listener into thinking that he did that sort of thing. "80/81" was a chance for Pat to play with some of the bigger names in jazz that hang around the studio in Oslo (Nor- way!) and I really like the album but it is definitely NOT an "elec- tronic" album. I'm sorry that you didn't enjoy the end of "As Falls..." since the "Bolero" that sums it up is one of my favorite parts... but Metheny and Mays were not trying to sound like Kraftwerk or TD. Pat explained in the last concert I saw him at (I've seen him at three) that essentially he and Lyle were trying to explore the range of the synthesizer as an instrument from a jazz point of view. This motivates the wonderful range on the album from the spacy 20-minute title track "As Falls..." (yes, Metheny can say this without stumbling!) to the dreamy synthesized Bill Evans tune to the lighter "It's for You". But tunes like the amaz- ing "Ozark" (which Lyle Mays used as the vehicle to express his incredi- ble technique in concert) are more typical of the Pat Metheny Group. By the way, has anyone else figured out what "Estupenda Graca" means in Portuguese? I strongly recommend the album as both a jazz album and an electronic album but you'll like it better if you like both kinds of music. None of Pat's albums are quite like any other but I can recommend as well "Bright Size Life" (a trio including Jaco Pastorius currently of Weather Report -- this has down-home but jazzy feel), "American Garage" (what it sounds like -- some have called it the first rock'n'roll album ECM has put out), "New Chatauqua" (haunting guitar solos, overdubbed to create several voices) and "Watercolors" (this has the most spacy feel of the lot and relies on the peculiar sound of Metheny's electronically altered guitar and Eberhard Weber's unique cello-like electric bass). It's too bad to hear from Jay Schwichtenberg that that strange radio show in Portland OR has gone downhill; that's where I first heard Tangerine Dream and other, bizarre, wonderful things... Donn Seeley ucbvax!sdcsvax!phonlab!donn ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.