Originally Posted by
Vogelfrei
I happen to like almost everything that Metheny has done, and find something worth listening to regardless of who he's playing with or when he made the recording. My favorite albums of his are probably, in no real order, Secret Story, The Way Up, Bright Size Life, Imaginary Day, and Metheny/Mehldau Quartet.
These albums pretty much all sound nothing alike, so I guess my preference for them has nothing to do with the overall sound. Rather, I think I like them because they each seem to represent something about him as a player: his gushing melodicism (Secret Story), rhythmic and formal complexity (The Way Up), wide-open sonorities (Bright Size Life), penchant for mystery (Imaginary Day), and wonderful improvisational fluency (Quartet).
I've never heard the suggestion that he's not comfortable with his own playing before, but I guess it is kind of a possibility. Metheny is sort of accepted by mainstream jazz now, but I feel like that wasn't always the case, and maybe that feeling of alienation is why he feels uncertain about just being himself on albums with guys like Sco and Jim Hall. I don't know. Or maybe he can't help but imitate, to a point, the sort of music that he's hearing at the time, which might explain why his playing varies so much on the different albums that he's cut with different people.
On that note, I don't think his playing varies all the time. A lot of the time I hear him do the same thing over completely different musical formats, which I guess is easy if you're blazing through a chromatic lick as it would work on just about anything.
Julian Lage Trio - Sat 27th April - Marciac,...
Today, 03:57 PM in The Players