Pat Metheny

CD version. 80/81 is the double album on which Pat Metheny stepped outside his own group and recorded with players from several generations: Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, Dewey Redman and Michael Brecker. Released by ECM in 1980, it showed a freer side of the guitarist. The music ranges from folk-tinged pieces to straight-ahead post-bop and open, unstructured playing, and it is now counted among the classics of his catalogue.

The quintet met at Talent Studio in Oslo on 26 to 29 May 1980, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Haden on bass and DeJohnette on drums form the rhythm section throughout. The two tenor saxophonists alternate: Brecker leads the opening Two Folk Songs, Redman joins Metheny on the title track, and both share Open. Two strands guide the record, as ECM's own notes put it. One is the free spirit of Ornette Coleman, whose Turnaround is the only piece not written by the players. The other is the Midwestern folk background that Metheny and Haden shared, having grown up in Missouri and Iowa.

The first disc opens with Two Folk Songs, more than twenty minutes long, where Metheny's strummed acoustic guitar carries Brecker's melody and DeJohnette takes a fiery solo. The title piece runs in constant motion, and Turnaround is played by the trio of guitar, bass and drums. On the second disc, Open is the freest track, a collective improvisation credited to all five musicians, built on exchanges between the two saxophonists. Every Day (I Thank You) is a long ballad, and the short Goin' Ahead closes the album with Metheny on his own.

In 1980 The Observer wrote that "Pat Metheny has brought his creativity to an unexpected high", and that he had recorded "his most sophisticated and improvisational music to date". The German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung found Brecker in top form. Looking back at ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo heard in the opener the "expansive pastoralism" typical of Metheny, and singled out Every Day (I Thank You) as one of his most beautiful recordings.

This is the 2CD edition on ECM Records, catalogue number ECM 1180/81, of an album first released as a double LP in 1980. The first disc holds four pieces, from Two Folk Songs to Turnaround, the second four more, from Open to Goin' Ahead.