Pat Metheny: Bright Size Life (ECM Luminessence 5523892. Review by Phil Johnson)
The first thing that strikes you on a vinyl reacquaintance with Metheny’s 1975 debut is how wonderfully bright and transparent it sounds, and how fully imagined a work of art it remains. The widescreen separation of the stereo image, with Metheny in one speaker and the electric bass of Jaco Pastorius in the other, with drummer Bob Moses hovering around behind them both, is devastatingly simple and effective. Everything sounds clear as a bell, with the tone of the electric guitar still relatively natural-seeming, and Jaco content to play the role of a rhythmic and melodic foil to Metheny as leader, who composes all the tunes bar the closing selection of Ornette’s ‘Round Trip/Broadway Blues’.
Their symbiotic interplay is still mind-boggling. On Side 2’s absolutely outstanding ‘Omaha Celebration’ – and pretty much everywhere else to at least some degree – the bassist’s counterpoint bassline-melodies lend Metheny’s beautifully poised tune a whole extra dimension. Listen carefully and you hear Jaco move from a simple accompanying measure to the insertion of a funky African feel that spurs the guitarist on to a new, more supple rhythmic groove. Then they both move back to their original roles to provide a perfect resolution. The Ornette closer that follows is a showcase for each of them, separately and together, intensifying as it progresses through a kind of history of bebop that both comments on and clarifies the roots of Coleman’s harmolodic concept. As he does everywhere on the album, Bob Moses’ role is to hold it all together with minimum fuss and showiness.
Returning to Side 1 and the opening title track, you’re made aware of how well Metheny had thought out exactly what he wanted to achieve, and the means he needed to do so. In a sleeve note that appeared originally with the release of his Selected Recordings on ECM, he says, “There was a way I wanted to improvise that I was unable to do on the forms of the standards and blues pieces that I had grown up playing around Kansas City, and I also knew that I wanted to try to develop mostly original music since it occurred to me that this might be the only chance I would ever get to make my own record.”
As we know now, he certainly managed to make a few more records, but ‘Bright Size Life’ remains the original gateway to what followed. That it succeeded so perfectly owes something to the example of Gary Burton, with whose band Metheny was playing, and whose original 1975 note on the album is included. And also to ECM’s Manfred Eicher, who produced. Metheny says Eicher wrote him encouraging letters and offered suggestions of suitable sidemen “and what kind of settings he imagined me playing in…I finally proposed the idea of using two musicians that I had been playing with a lot, bassist Jaco Pastorius and drummer Bob Moses.” The rest is history.
LINK: Buy Bright Size Life from Presto Music
‘Sirabhorn’: an interview with the dedicatee
