From Beyond the Missouri Sky and Letter From Home to As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls and We Live Here, Pat Metheny album titles often speak of being in a location. These are places in his mind that inform his music, not necessarily physical whereabouts. The just-released From This Place is another one of those ‘location’ albums and Metheny is being deeply aware of the current political climate — a little more on that later — but also sizing up his entire, nearly half-century career.
Metheny introduces on record a whole new band that the singular guitarist has been breaking in on the road of late: Linda May Han Oh (bass) and Gwilym Simcock (piano), and retaining only his stalwart drummer Antonio Sanchez. This quartet formally returns Metheny to the guitar/piano/bass/drums setup of his Pat Metheny Group but for the first time without his longtime collaborator, the late Lyle Mays.
Though the Pat Metheny Group hadn’t recorded an album since 2005’s excellent The Way Up, Metheny had been inching back toward that PMG sound; he used an elaborate contraption to essentially mimic it on Orchestrion (2010) and then added a keyboardist, Giulio Carmassi, to his guitar/sax/bass/drums Unity Band for 2016’s The Unity Sessions.
The very first From This Place track “America Defined,” intentional or not, does make nods back to earlier recordings: the through-composed structure resembles the song format used for The Way Up, the echoing, background crowd noise conjures up parts of the side-long title track of the Metheny/Mays collaboration As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls, and the train samples is remindful of the PMG hit “Last Train Home.”
So, From This Place is a Pat Metheny Group reboot and, well, it is not. The leader installed two distinguishing features to this album, the two things that makes this worthy of your attention even if you’ve heard all the other Metheny music and pretty much have him figured out. For one, there’s the backing of the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra. Legendary arrangers Alan Broadbent and Gil Goldstein wrote the charts, but only after the core band recorded their parts. That was important because as a result the orchestra never gets in the way and serve to add tension and poignancy in the right spots.
The other thing Metheny tried out is much less obvious but makes the music hold up better over repeated listens. He’s revealed on his website that while touring recently with bassist great Ron Carter, he asked Carter why the live material played by Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet were all standards and other older songs during the time they were recording new material in the studio. Carter explained to Metheny “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.”
Like Miles, Metheny has always built his bands with some of the brightest talents available, sometimes veteran (Sanchez), sometimes emerging (Simcock). This time, he also copied Miles’ approach to making those classic records of the mid-60s by touring extensively with this new outfit until it became a well-oiled machine, then put them in the studio and showed them the material for the first time. You’re not just hearing Metheny’s songs; you’re also hearing the sound of discovery.
Maybe it’s those pair of special touches that contributes toward strikingly cinematic pieces with dramatic flairs.
“You Are” builds on a repeating figure, adding a little more momentum with each go around (driven forcefully by Sanchez), and the harmonic-enhancing wordless vocals is another tool long in Metheny’s arsenal that identifies the music as uniquely his. But instead of this leading up to a dramatic ending, the orchestration, drums and vocals just slide away, turning power into fragility. “Pathmaker” is an mathy strain done with a lot of expression…in other words, the kind of stuff Metheny already mastered on Bright Size Life. This time, he adds loads more niceties and the whole thing culminates in a climatic trading of fours between Sanchez and the rest of the band/orchestra. Like many of the selections on this album, “Sixty-Six” starts off unassumingly and then blooms into a song of much weight and character. The hand of orchestration is heavier on through Oh’s sublime bass remarks until Metheny’s lively guitar run momentarily ratchets up the fervor and ends up with the orchestra contributing to a rousing crescendo.
Oh’s exemplary bass work anchors the whole, heavily orchestrated “Wide And Far” and Metheny’s familiar softened tones illuminates a bright, intelligent melody that could come from no one but him. The focus shifts back to Oh toward the end, with an imposing bass feature that resides in a hard to define area between improvising and comping. Oh forms the foundation for the fluid waltz “Same River,” Simcock puts in a lilting aside and then out of nowhere, Pat’s ‘The Red One’ comes roaring in to up the ante (you didn’t think he would leave that at home, did you?). Before this can become a blowing session, he returns to electric guitar and this fetching pattern of chords gets the main focus again.
Metheny’s tender side shows up several times on From This Place, and none of them are nondescript because there are certain touches applied to each of them. “The Past In Us” is one of Metheny’s cottony ballads he customarily leads on acoustic guitar; Gregoire Maret’s homesick harmonica is a perfect counterpart. Broadbent and Goldstein create a symphonic intro for “Love May Take A While” that’s worthy of a Nelson Riddle recording and then caresses the orchestra around Metheny’s graceful guitar prose and his gorgeous melody.
“From This Place,” the song, is another of Metheny’s soft tone poems but this time instilled with lyrics solemnly sung by Me’Shell Ndegeocello, stirring up emotions similar to “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” If nothing else, it makes you sit up and pay attention for the simple reason that Metheny rarely has words put to his music — which he asked Alison Riley to do in this case — to better express sorrow over the 2016 election and for hope going forward.
To be honest, I had been looking for Pat Metheny to pull a hard left turn and do something entirely unexpected (Song X, Zero Tolerance For Silence, Imaginary Day etc.) as he was apt to do earlier in his career. It felt like he was due for that. But who can complain? Broadly speaking, From This Place is the classic Metheny plot updated with a few new twists inserted. That is still miles better than what the vast majority of artists are capable of today, jazz or not.
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