Pat Metheny - 1983 [1986] "Travels"

 

Travels is the Pat Metheny Group's first live album, released in 1983. It won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Fusion Performance.

The album consists of live material recorded in July, October, and November 1982, in Philadelphia, Dallas, Sacramento, Hartford, and Nacogdoches (Texas). The Group for this album consisted of Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Steve Rodby, Dan Gottlieb, and guest Nana Vasconcelos.

It was voted number 570 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000).

Travels was recorded as part of the tour for the Group's 1982 studio album, Offramp, but also featured previously unrecorded and unreleased songs.

In the liner notes for his ECM Rarum compilation album, Metheny expressed great love for the live rendition of "Are You Going with Me?" and appreciated the audience for whom it was played in Philadelphia.

The track "Song for Bilbao", dedicated to audiences in Bilbao, Spain, was often played as an encore.

This is a truly remarkable album for jazz and non-jazz fans alike. Although Metheny's compositions are quite complex, they are immediately accessible. melodic and at times dream-like. This album will quickly draw you in and keep you on the hook from start to finish. As a bonus, this is a very fine pressing with excellent dynamics. I purchased the album originally in vinyl when it first came out not long after I had seen them live at Red Rocks. But since disposing of my vinyl collection years ago, I had forgotten about the album. Thrilled beyond words to have it back. It sounds as tight and fresh and ethereal as I remember it. A must buy for the serious music collection.

Some live albums are distractions and/or are sloppy in comparison to the original, but that is not the case in this wonderful collection. It is so powerful in its delivery, so honest in its presentation, that I sometimes just stop doing everything to listen to its detail, and then, conversely, to its completeness. Every player comes through so keenly - and yet it merges so well.
My personal favorite: The Fields, The Sky. The simple play between Metheny and Mays, the unpretentious presentation, the bass and drums pushing to a climax...it always makes me laugh with glee!
My favorite album to put on when the house is empty and I can rev it up.

Now well into its gliding Brazilian-tinged mode, the Pat Metheny Group hits the road, as this two-CD set catches the band live in Dallas, Philadelphia, Hartford, Sacramento, and Nacogdoches, TX. Percussionist Naná Vasconcelos is still listed as a "special guest," but ever since Wichita Falls, he had not only been a part of the group, he was the transforming element in the Metheny "sound," adding his various shakers, effects and ethereal vocals. Sidekick Lyle Mays gets deeper into floating, glistening synthesizer textures, but he is still able to take formidable and touching solos on acoustic grand piano. Still experimenting with new hardware, Metheny's work on a detuned guitar synthesizer gives the live "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls" an exotic Balinese-like sound. Other highlights are the hard Brazilian grooves on "Straight On Red" and "Song for Bilbao," as well as the trademark Metheny glide of "Are You Going With Me?" -- and the brief title track has a winning, guileless simplicity much like that of Keith Jarrett in a prayerful mood. If you liked the popular Offramp, you'll fall for Travels, too, but get the former album first.

If you’ve ever desired a Pat Metheny Group greatest hits album, then Travels is for you. Compiled from the group’s touring activities in 1982, this double set is a must-have. From the glittering lotus of melody that is “San Lorenzo” to the even more effusive “Phase Dance,” the requisite classics are all here. We also get a curtailed, though no less epic, version of “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls,” which here draws out like a long cinematic fade and throws the windows open wide to the band’s boggling sonic purview. And one can hardly help but swoon from the dizzying heights reached by this live version of “Are You Going With Me?” Here the studio version seems but a memory on the path to glory, and finds exuberant life in what is perhaps Metheny’s best solo on record. An absolute affirmation.

Yet the album’s true value comes in the handful of songs exclusive to it. Through these we encounter softer sides of the PMG, each burnished like a different shade of leather. “The Fields, The Sky” is an outstanding place to start. Vasconcelos’s unmistakable berimbau threads a supremely melodious backdrop, while Metheny is at once distant and nearby, winding a slow and organic retrograde around the fiery center within. Vasconcelos is also the voice of “Goodbye,” a forlorn piece of sonic stationery across which Metheny inscribes a most heartbreaking letter toward a ripple of an ending. This pairs nicely with the title track, a laid-back photograph of Americana that is like a rocking chair on the back porch: lulling, and affording an unobstructed vista. Similar strains await us in “Farmer’s Trust,” a slow plunge into an ocean of undriven roads gilded by the whispering of baby birds and the rustling of the leaves that hide them, and in the smoothly paved blacktops of the synth-driven “Extradition” and “Song for Bilbao.” Each of these creeps along like wispy clouds over badlands, spun by keyboardist Lyle Mays into sunset. But it isn’t all drawl, as drummer Dan Gottlieb proves in the invigorating “Straight On Red,” throughout which he provides the perfect springboard for the masterful dialogues of Metheny and Mays.

Track listing:

All tracks are written by Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays except where noted.

Disc one:
1.    "Are You Going with Me?"         9:19
2.    "The Fields, the Sky"    Metheny    7:46
3.    "Goodbye"    Metheny    8:16
4.    "Phase Dance"         8:03
5.    "Straight on Red"         7:26
6.    "Farmer's Trust"    Metheny    6:25

Disc two:
1.    "Extradition"    Metheny    5:45
2.    "Goin' Ahead/As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls"         16:22
3.    "Travels"         5:03
4.    "Song for Bilbao"    Metheny    8:28
5.    "San Lorenzo"         13:35

Personnel

    Pat Metheny – acoustic and electric guitars, guitar synthesizer
    Lyle Mays – piano, synthesizers, electric organ, autoharp, Synclavier
    Steve Rodby – acoustic and electric bass, bass synthesizer
    Danny Gottlieb – drums
    Nana Vasconcelos – percussion, voice, berimbau