Track Listing

1. New Chautauqua
2. Country Poem
3. Long Ago Child/Fallen Star
4. Hermitage
5. Sue�o con M�xico
6. Daybreak

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36659 in Music
• Released on: 2000-02-29
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
For this 1979 recording, Pat Metheny tried something very different: a solo CD with extensive overdubs that put the emphasis on his acoustic guitar playing. It's in an idiom all its own, mixing the open harmonies of country music with some flamenco phrases, resulting in the melodic inventiveness of jazz with the acoustic virtuosity of John Fahey. At times, the music has the feel of a universal campfire, with phrases that can bend from Appalachian folk picking to the music of India, with gently amplified leads over acoustic rhythm and subdued electric bass. The overall effect of this consort of one may be merely soothing, but like all of Metheny's work, the details are there to keep the interest level high. --Stuart Broomer

Customer Reviews

For your great listening pleasure!!!!
This is on of Metheny's finest solo venture.Every song is wonderful.A quiet CD,good for that "Sunday morning,with
coffee and the newspaper" His focus for each of his writtings
is "on the mark". This is a must for you collection!!!

Get this album!
Pat Metheny is one of the greatest musicians of our generation. In the '70s (and up to the present day) he busied himself re-inventing and expanding the genre of jazz in ways that were progressive and ingenious, but at the same time totally accessible to people other than musical scholars. In the middle of making some of the greatest albums ever produced with all kinds of bands, large and small, he decided to make a solo album. But this was a real solo album. He went into a studio with a collection of guitars and basses and, with the help of a multi-track recorder, composed, arranged, performed and produced every note of this album himself. Vanity project? Maybe. But not a wasted one. Not only does he show a flawless technical mastery of his instruments, but every piece is so painstakingly constructed and emotively performed that you could love it without ever noticing the technical fireworks. It predated the Windham Hill revolution, but it's still superior in every important way to anything by Michael Hedges or Will Ackerman (and this is coming from a big fan of both of those artists). Almost always forgotten when listing Pat Metheny's greatest works, it never falls from the top of my list.

Great American Road Music
Metheny's an innovator and has been all over the map over his long career in terms of styles, moods, textures, and sounds.

Here we have an early effort in which he takes his guitar and overdubs an introspective, wide-open-spaces musical journey across America, weaving in jazz, folk, country, rock, mountain music, and everything in between. If you love his work on Joni Mitchell's Amelia (performed live on Shadows and Light), you'll love the sound of this record.

The mood is mellow but not dull, quiet but not silent, and the results are spectacular. This is the cd to take with you on a trip across the western frontier, or a short hop to Burger King. Works either way.