Pat Metheny/Ornette Coleman - Song X [Twentieth Anniversary Edition] (CD)

All Music Guide

Song X was Path Metheny's first recording for the Geffen label in 1985. After a prosperous career with ECM, Metheny realized a lifelong dream by collaborating with Ornette Coleman. (He had collaborated with both bassist Charlie Haden, an Orentte alumnus, and drummer Jack DeJohnette before. Denardo Coleman a second drummer, adds immeasurably to the rhythmic complexity of the music here.) Coleman had been a major influence on Metheny's ideas about melody and harmony as well as space. Song X was the first of a number of deviations from the guitarist and composer's trademark sound and direction. This pairing of the two was jagged and startling when it was firts issued. . The recording sent his traditional fans reeling and wondering if he'd gone off his rockerthe resulting tour sent many of the streaming out of auditoriums in droves. As Metheny describes in his liner notes, the CD medium at the time was limited to about 48 minutes and the choices for the final package were made according to... those limitations. 20 years later, CDs hold 80 minutes and Metheny not only remastered and remixed the entire disc, he also tacked on six tracks from the original sessions to the beginning making it an almost entirely different offering that becomes revelatory in its new context. The additional cuts were al written by Coleman. His "Police People," opens the set. Haden's bass figure introduces a lovely, celebratory dual front line melody at once knotty and euphoric. Metheny takes the first solo. While it follows his own lyrical path, his sound is edgier, his phrasing more complex, wit more notes in the frame. Coleman follows him immediately and turns the dialogue more toward RB. Methny takes the cue and strolls it out on the ledge for him. It's breathtaking. "The Good Life," takes post bop and Caribbean kissed melody and winds them together as Coleman and Metheny engage in gorgeous counterpoint. Denardo's playing angels DeJohnette's and pushes the soloists. "Word From Bird," showcases the band as adept and strutting through tough mutant bop changes based in blues and offers another hearing of the kind of depth and dimension this band was capable of offering; the choices on the original release didn't reflect his view at all. "Compute" is more complex, denser and yet utterly full of gorgeous interplay and driven engagement. "The Veil," is almost like a film noir serial piece, all nocturnal and smoky until its gets to the soloing where contrapuntal exchange becomes the m.o. And then, the record we know as Son X begins. Its sound altered somewhat dramatically, its intensity more focused and fervent and its edges exposed. After the new prelude, the session comes into full view, the attack and agenda becomes clearer, more focused, more driven to explore not only boundaries but the insides of harmonic interplay and rhythmic invention. Duie to Haden's canny sense of time, both drummers are free to explore and explode in the compositional frame, go head to head and dovetail one another in response to the front line soloing. IN sum, this is an entirely new album, one that not only warrants its reissue but demands an entirely new assessment as to the striking success of the collaboration and of it sown place in the jazz canon. - Thom Jurek, All Music Guide Read more Less