Pat Metheny - "From this Place"

Well, Metheny is a ripper when it comes to cool arrangements. I saw him live twice and he always gave the best of himself and his music and he really knows how to choose the venues when it comes to live !

Same Metheny album formula--composed, performed, arranged, and engineered to absolute perfection (what else would we expect from this master.) The problem is that I've heard most of it before: it's just rehashings of songs and themes and styles that he's done many times before--a lot of it pure updates" of music he'd already done on his 1992 masterpiece A Secret Story--and it's really not prog or even j-r fusion, just Metheny's jazz-side (à la Wes Montgomery). The only new "experimental" stuff I heard was the Radiohead influence in the brilliant second half of the opening song ("American Undefined") and on the Math Rock-like third song, "You Are."

Again, the performances are breathtakingly virtuosic--except for Pat's: while his composition and production skills are still at their very best (which says a lot), his guitar skills are definitely slipping. Plus, he's not as able to come up with "brain worm" melodic hooks with his guitar the way he used to. The orchestration is wonderful, but, again, purely "updates" (perhaps improvements) of those recorded for A Secret Story (Jeremy Lubbock conducting the London Symphony). Even the Toots Thielemans harmonica play from A Secret Story's gorgeous "Always and Forever" and "Antonia" are here replicated (using Gregoire Maret since Toots died in 2016) on "The Past Is in Us."

Pat is obviously feeling very nostalgic. (At 66 years old, he has a right to.) Still, he has once again surrounded himself with la crème de la crème in terms of personnel--virtuoso musicians who can deliver the incredibly nuanced music that Pat desires (demands?).

An excellent jazz album delivered in the typical Pat Metheny formula.