Track Listing

1. Son of Thirteen
2. At Last You're Here
3. Let's Move
4. Snova
5. Calvin's Keys
6. Is This America? (Katrina 2005)
7. When We Were Free
8. Dreaming Trees
9. Red One
10. Day Trip

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7980 in Music
• Released on: 2008-01-29
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds

Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Our job is to be deeply in the moment, says Pat Metheny. Day Trip, the first release from Metheny's current trio lineup, featuring bassist Christian McBride and drummer Antonio Sanchez, vividly depicts the group at one particularly inspired moment. As Metheny explains, We did it the old-school way. We'd been touring for about four or five years at different times and then went in and recorded, rather than making a record and touring behind it. We worked like gangbusters and finished in a day, so the title Day Trip fit. Besides, this is kind of a trip band; they take you on a journey. The Day Trip sessions were recorded at Manhattan’s Right Track studio in late October 2005 and sequenced into a ten-song set earlier this year. The album is being released in conjunction with a national tour the trio will embark upon in February 2008. Metheny already reconvened the group this fall for an enthusiastically received series of small market dates at colleges and theatres; the trio ended its preliminary run with four concerts in South Africa. Reviews from the daily U.S. press along the way have been a compendium of superlatives. The Buffalo News declared, Metheny is sharing his musical soul with the two finest musicians of their generation. The Times Union of Albany concurred: Christian McBride on stand-up bass and drummer Antonio Sanchez wove their way into Metheny’s music... and played with a telepathic virtuosity. And the Louisville Courier Journal summed up the nightly reaction to the trio’s sets: It was a collaborative tour de force that earned a standing ovation. Christian is an amazing musician and Antonio is the drummer of this generation, says Metheny. 35 year-old bassist McBride had played alongside Roy Hargrove, Freddie Hubbard and others, before stepping up to lead his own group; 36 year-old drummer Sanchez is a member of The Pat Metheny Group. On Day Trip, Metheny offers plenty of excitement in his solos and the trio cranks up the funk on "The Red One", (a version of which was previously released on Metheny’s collaboration with John Scofield "I Can See Your House From Here"). However they generally eschew flash for a more easy-going groove; McBride calls it a softer, more traditional sound. Perhaps most eloquent among these tracks is the elegiac, folk-like melody of "Is This America?" (Katrina 2005). 2007 was an exceptional year for Metheny.

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Customer Reviews

Great stuff..
The late jazz writer Richard Cook described Pat Metheny's enormous audience as a mixture of "progressive-rock listeners, fusion fans, and plain old lovers of guitar heroes". In other words, he manages to cover quite a few stylistic bases, but here's an album that will appeal most to the hard-core jazz listeners among Metheny's many fans.
'Metheny hooks up with his regular partners, Christian McBride on double bass and Antonio Sanchez on drums. As you'd expect for musicians who have played hundreds of dates together they're very comfortable in each other's company, with McBride's marvellously deep, rich bass really shining throughout'(BBC).
'In its early stages, "Day Trip" seems to fall into some familiar postbop traps (too much technique, overwrought themes) but it soon settles into some jubilant improvising from all three, on the kind of bluesy grooves, Latin swingers and inviting ballads that suggest Wes Montgomery has returned to life and found the hippest 21st-century world-music partners he could' (Guardian).
He dazzles on 10 new originals.
"Let's Move" is fast and boppish, "At Last You're Here" is a fine ballad, bound to become a classic - as might his bluesy "Calvin's Keys" and a bittersweet acoustic lament for flood-battered New Orleans, "Is This America?"
For technique, taste and originality, Pat's still the man.
He is alternately pastorally lyrical and hard-swinging, reminding us of his origins in the music of Wes Montgomery and Jim Hall respectively.
Apart from the unmemorable nature of some of the compositions, this is delightful stuff.
The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery
Hallmarks: The Best of Jim Hall

Day Trip
I'm going to have to say I was disappointed with this album for a number of different reasons. I'll start by saying that it is not by any stretch a bad album, per-se. Metheny does have some serious chops and his new trio-mates, Christian McBride and Antonio Sanchez, are both excellent musicians that I have liked for a while in their own rights. Those concessions aside I have to say that I feel like Metheny is stuck in a rut musically speaking. I think its such a shame that Metheny sounds just like last time here. Not that Metheny sounded bad the last time around, just that I was hoping for something different or new to come with the new trio. If there is any exploration here it is tepid at best. At first when I began listening to this album, it struck me as pretty good standard Metheny affair. I found I could not stomach an entire albums worth of it though and began to zone out during Metheny's solo's. The album became for me a vehicle of the two other trio members who are both in fine form here. Still, however, a disappointment.

Stunningly beautiful
Guitarist Pat Metheny gets together with what he calls "two of the best people on earth"; drummer Antonio Sanchez and bassist Christian McBride - all three of them geniuses in their respective fields, if you ask me - for this beautiful set of 10 songs lasting just over one hour. I often find myself searching for words when reviewing any Pat Metheny project. What's there to say anyway, apart from, it's stunningly beautiful and just as good as (if not better than) I expected it to be? It is very true though, that no new musical ground is broken on this disc - hence the "more of the same" comment by a previous reviewer; a comment I tend to agree with - but that doesn't bother me much. I don't think I could ever get bored of music by Pat Metheny and the album loses no stars from me as a result.

Metheny plays electric guitar for the most, only choosing acoustic guitar on the thinly veiled political lament "Is This America? (katrina 2005)", on which McBride takes a bow to his bass, and then again on "Dreaming Trees". He also plays his trademark guitar synth on "When We Were Free", a cover of a song that originally appeared on the Pat Metheny Group 1996 album Quartet and again on "The Red One", another one I've heard before on I Can See Your House from Here, the 1994 album Pat made with John Scofield. Sanchez and McBride make sure the covers work, in that they both actually add something new to the originals, which were pretty awesome to begin with. Kudos to them.

The guitar/bass/drums trio format has always been my favourite of them all and this particular trio has not let me down. Pick this up if you're a Metheny fan or just interested in sampling some good jazz guitar. It's worth every penny.

One question though, Pat: When's the next PMG album due? It's been three years already!