Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Are You Going With Me?
2. Fields, The Sky, The
3. Goodbye
4. Phase Dance
5. Straight On Red
6. Farmer's Trust

Disc 2:

1. Extradition
2. Goin' Ahead / As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls
3. Travels
4. Song For Bilbao
5. San Lorenzo
6. Extradition
7. Going Ahead-As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls
8. Travels
9. Song for Bilbao
10. San Lorenzo

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36700 in Music
• Released on: 2000-02-29
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: Live

Amazon.com
This two-CD set was recorded live during several 1982 concerts, covering music that grew out of the studio recordings As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls and Offramp. At this stage, the Pat Metheny Group was a quintet with longtime partners Lyle Mays on piano, organ, and synthesizers; Dan Gottlieb on drums; Steve Rodby on bass; and Nana Vasconcelos, contributing a distinctive Brazilian element, on percussion and voice. Touring constantly, the group successfully balanced their increasingly electronic sound and spontaneity with Vasconcelos's rhythmic ingenuity, which clearly acted as stimulus to Metheny's consistently inventive guitar work. It's a fitting commemoration of the tremendous success that the Metheny Group had begun to enjoy, both a travelogue of their concert venues and an in-depth look at their diverse material. --Stuart Broomer

Customer Reviews

A wholly remarkable live album
Recorded less than a year after the magnificent 'Offramp', 'Travels' is proof that the PMG were on a creative high. Music was pouring from Metheny and Mays. Extraordinarily for a live album, over half the tracks were entirely new and have not been heard, before or since, on any studio album. And none of them are the hastily put-together "we only met five minutes before the recording" jams that characterise some jazz albums, even some of Pat's later output.

No, every piece here is intricately worked out but allows space for improvisation. Pat said in an interview soon after this album's release that he preferred this version of 'Are You Going With Me?' to the 'Offramp' original. Both have their merits. Both are brilliant. To give you an idea of the way that the use of music has evolved in the 19 years since this was recorded, the live version here also features on a new double CD of chill-out music entitled 'Sunset Ibiza'.

Track #3, 'Goodbye', is a sublime piece of music, similar in mood to 'Offramp's 'Au Lait', and features some Brazilian singing from Vasconcelos, who seemed to spend every concert squatting by his gong, if the album photos are to be believed!

There are two delightfully simple tunes on this album -- 'Farmer's Trust' and 'Travels' -- which are gorgeously executed duets by Metheny and Mays, with the rest of the band in the background. They are almost love poems, a high point in the musical understanding between Mays and Metheny.

If this album has any lows, or rather, any not-quite-so-highs, it is that the two tracks from the 'Pat Metheny Group' album -- 'Phase Dance' and 'San Lorenzo' -- add little to the originals. But they are not lesser versions, and they go a long way towards justifying this album's claim to be a representative compilation of the PMG's early works.

It's almost impossible for any artist to create two masterpieces in succession, but the PMG achieved this with 'Offramp' and 'Travels'. The French might call this farewell to drummer Dan Gottlieb 'Travaux'.

The great virtual road trip
When the Pat Metheny Group came to the University of Virginia in 1984, I was one of the first students to get to the ticket line, not because I'd ever heard of them, or even of jazz-rock fusion, but because the man I had a deep crush on said, casually, they were pretty good and he thought he might go. He waited a couple of days, figuring no one but him had ever heard of Metheny--I did not. I got a ticket--he did not. I think he may have forgiven me by now. The man, who is now my husband partly because of that evening, ate dinner with me anyway, and walked me rather generously to the concert hall, and then left me there at the door to encounter something I'd never heard before. The group had chosen a relatively small classical concert hall with several tiers of opera seating. Chamber quartets usually played there, and Sir Ian McKellen had performed soliloquys one night...not the usual rock concert scene at the basketball stadium, for sure. And it was packed to the rafters. So I squeezed myself into a solo seat between two tweedy turtlenecked junior professors and hoped for the best.

And got much more--if you've heard the music anywhere, you know it can send you on a trek through the darkest Amazon looking for rare orchids or jar you back to your fresh awkward youth with the remembered offkey fumbles of a junior high school marching band on its first day of outdoor practice. I shut my eyes halfway through and let the music peel everything else away.

After that concert, I played the Travels album, front to back, back to front, daily for more than two years. I think I wore out a couple of needles on it. That music got me through physical chemistry, it got me through the costuming course and the late-night painting sessions that were supposed to be my distraction from p-chem, and it ended by seeping into my bones.

The loose-jointed music is perfect for writing to, you can see the great road picture flowing from your fingers as you listen. Some of the pieces are dark and sensual, some unexpectedly light-hearted, some practical and streamlined like the polished chrome roadside diner from the late '50s with the real pot roast dinner that you suddenly spot on your cross-country journey, some wistful at the knowledge that it's time to pack up again and head back to the Greyhound station. All of it is uniquely heartwood American, and absolutely none of it is worn down with false flagwaving cliches. It is brainy, casual, serious, and freewheeling in the same moment, conscious without being self-conscious, and it stirs the faint breeze of hope for America, the real thing, in a way that no Homeland Security propaganda anthem ever will. Go and get this album, now that it is on CD and won't warp like my old loved-to-death LPs. Then take your seat on the bus and start writing your own great American road trip.

An unforgettable CD
A boyfriend introduced me to this work of Pat Metheny back in 1988. I still play it regulalry, it is that good. Pat's guitar literally sings like a human being here, the skill and Soul in this album are just beyond the beyond. It left me speachless the first time I heard it and it leaves me speachless still. This is the kind of music that makes one appreciate the role of a musician in society: inspirational, moving, this music ingites the emotions and inflames the Spirit. Awesome stuff, even after all these years.