SECRET STORY

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The masterpiece album Secret story is an extremely well made classical & modern urban soft jazz album with progressive & even acoustic New Age elements. The album is long: more than 70 minutes of delightful music. Curiously, Lyle Mays is rarely present on the songs. Nevertheless, Metheny made a very good job!! The keyboards, the percussions and the guitars are really perfect! You have to listen it with HI-FI product, if you do not want to conclude it's a supermarket music!! The piece "Antonia" is noticeable with is wonderful vibrant rhythmic accordion! The gentle finesse involved is palpable, and the omnipresent, delicate & slow orchestration involved gives this album something very relaxing, noble, addictive and accessible! When I listen to this album using a state-of-the- art sound system, I really have a feeling of GRANDEUR!

EXTREMELY RECOMMENDED!!!!

SECRET STORY has been promoted in some quarters as Pat Metheny's "World Music album", but this seems way off the mark, since it contains few 'foreign' sounds (from Pat's point of view), apart from an amazing Cambodian contribution to the shortish opening number.

Most of the album feels like a travelogue, though, or rather: like film music accompanying a glossy travelogue - a feeling which is encouraged by Jeremy Lubbock's soothing orchestral arrangements. Almost all of Metheny's album sleeves evoke the theme of travel (and of course the man once released a live album entitled TRAVELS), so as soon as you see this album's song titles ('Cathedral in a suitcase', 'See the World' etc.) you feel Metheny is confronting you with musical impressions of things he may have observed from a bus or an airplane window.

A few of the tunes included are little more than orchestra-dominated movie-soundtrack fluff. Others are based on simplistic pop melodies (e.g. 'Sunlight', 'Rain River' and 'See the World'), but as soon as Metheny embarks on one of his inimitable solos (on this album they're usually backed by strings) all is forgiven - the listener sits back, closes his eyes and simply enjoys.

The album's final three or four tracks have a distinctly mournful quality. Although I'm not aware of the exact biographical details, the song titles ('The truth will always be', 'Tell her you saw me' and 'Not to be forgotten (our final hour)') point in the direction of love lost. 'The truth will always be' starts quietly, like a funeral march, but features a passionate guitar synth solo so exuberant you just HAVE to call this prog (not jazz): it's closer to Yes' "And you and I" than to anything by Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk. By golly, how I wish Steve Howe still had the inspiration (as well as the good taste and the money) to do something similar!

Although rather grandiloquent at times, SECRET STORY must be considered one of Pat's most enjoyable albums from the 1980s- 1990s. It also contains (far too brief) cameos by Toots Thielemans, the world's greatest harmonica player, and by the Japanese pop singer/jazz pianist Akiko Yano (former wife of Ryuichi Sakamoto).

The one problem I have with Pat Metheny is simply that he has just down right released too many albums. How is a voracious music lover like myself supposed to keep up with all of his material and be able to listen to everything else I desire to hear? Both good and bad here is that Pat's albums are not all essential; so we can pick and choose which ones stay in our rotations. Secret Story is one of those albums. It is quite possibly his most diverse and large-scale release to date (just look at that huge lineup of musicians on this disc!). This disc features Pat's signature sounds, with an added lush, orchestral and new-age blend, whose ebb and flow throughout the disc are a really unique and exciting touch. The world elements are not omnipresent or even overt, but they have a very strong, albeit inconspicuous, effect on the atmosphere. It isn't a very catchy jazz record, but it is truly a magnificent and memorable experience that anyone interested at all in jazz should hear.

7/10

"Secret Story" is one of Pat Metheny's most ambitious, unique, and progressive works.

One of Metheny's highest and most interesting points of his career, "Secret Story" is not your usual guitar oriented jazz album. There's as a matter of fact something to it that makes it one of this guitarist's most ambitious, unique, and frankly progressive works.

This kind of jazz is labeled by some smooth jazz, but it's actually much more than that: there are tons of synthesizer sounds (played by Pat himself, with nothing but his guitar, and of course MIDI cords), tons of world music influences, especially African and European, the latter one by chance being part of the most melancholic side of the LP. This is Metheny exploring and experimenting, and he does it so well that it is always enjoyable to hear him do so. The musicianship surrounding him is decent, but not memorable, as obviously Pat is the center of the album, and all the noticeable sounds (except for drums) are created by him.

"Secret Story" to me is one of the perfect examples of Metheny's favorite themes, such as travel and being on the road: the world music influence is the exquisite proof. But we also find this theme in moods themselves, cheerful, full of hope and excitement, but at times also full of melancholy and even sadness. It literally is an adventurous albums that visits different sounds textures and new horizons. My only complaint is that it is way too long, clocking in almost 80 minutes in length, and I strongly feel that the results would have been the same if it was a half an hour shorter. However, the longer episodes seem to be more appealing than others: "Finding And Believing"'s ten minutes are pretty epic, thanks to the outstanding African-esque vocals that create a wonderful atmosphere, "The Truth Will Always Be" a greatly structured song, with a nice, calm hook that echoes along the nine minutes of the entire track. "Antonia" is a shorter, but extremely nostalgic piece, of soothing beauty, "Cathedral In a Suitcase" a brilliant evocation and summary of the general moods that the album as a whole creates.

"Secret Story", despite it's excessiveness, is a great treat, an album that a Pat Metheny fan will love dearly, for sure. I never had so much emotions brought up by listening to one of his albums.