Pat Metheny

CD version. Bright Size Life is the first studio album as a leader by the American guitarist Pat Metheny, recorded for ECM in December 1975 and released in 1976. It is a trio with Jaco Pastorius on fretless electric bass and Bob Moses on drums. The record set out a bright, open approach to melody and harmony that was new in jazz guitar at the time. Its title tune has since become a standard that guitarists still study.

Metheny had first appeared on ECM in 1974 in Gary Burton's band on Ring. Here he brought his own touring trio of the day into the studio. Pastorius was then virtuosic but largely unknown, and he and Metheny had already played together on a record led by the pianist Paul Bley. The album was cut at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg with Martin Wieland as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. Studio time was short, and Metheny felt rushed to finish the album in a few days. Burton wrote the liner notes. Seven of the eight pieces are Metheny's, and the eighth is a medley of two tunes by Ornette Coleman.

The trio's sound depends on space. Metheny's six-string and electric twelve-string guitars sit in one channel and Pastorius's bass in the other, with Moses's cymbals hovering between them. The bass works as a second melodic voice rather than a support. Sirabhorn stretches its harmony wide and carries something of the folk lyricism of Metheny's native Missouri, while Missouri Uncompromised and Omaha Celebration swell into ecstatic playing. The closing Round Trip/Broadway Blues runs Coleman's two themes together and seems to find its shape as it goes.

Burton's note called it "positive and hot and simply excellent". Revisiting it on vinyl for UK Jazz News, Phil Johnson found the stereo picture "devastatingly simple and effective" and the interplay between guitar and bass still astonishing. In Jazz Magazine Étienne Dorsay wrote that jazz guitar has a before and an after this record. Speaking to the Library of Congress in 2021, Metheny said he could happily play the whole album today, having meant it as a statement on melody, harmony and trio playing.

This is the CD edition of ECM 1073, first released in 1976.