TRAVELS (PAT METHENY GROUP)

If you like the music of Pat Metehny Group, you cannot avoid this double live-album. As already noted, surely it marks the end of a long period, started witk " Watercolors" appeared in 1977; end that the successive "First Circle" will confirm, in spite of the presence of several inaltered ingedients in the music. Just before The Pat Meteheny Group had registered Offramp, that i consider one of the best studio album of the entire history of the Group, and from which "Travels" takes out the ouverture with "Are you going with me?". It's happened to me to go, maybe five or six times, to the Pat Metheny Group concert; i listened always to a performance of this tune and i have to confess that the version registered in Travels is really solid and Pat Metheny solo is very "happy". Travels is an album that provides a lot of opportunities: there is an opportunity to deeply estimate the double face of Pat Metheny inspiration, almost paradoxical between Milton Nascimento and Ornette Coleman; an opportunity to listen to many tunes ("The fields, the Sky", "Goodbye", for example) that appear only here (if am not mistaken, of course); and third (but not least) to appreciate "As Falls Wichita, So Falls wichita Fall", curtailed, it's true, of the long and suggestive coda, but that, I think, offer an exemplary specimen of the adventurous dialogue that Pat Merteheny and Lyle Mays succeeed in weaving. For this and for much more I was forced to omit because of my pedestrian english, the rate is 5 star.