EastWest Review

Unity Band

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2012

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by Alissa Ordabai

Pat Metheny’s gift for creating magnificent improvised narratives stands out even starker next to the other chief soloist of this release – tenor saxophonist Chris Potter. The jazz guitar guru’s mindful development of story lines, with episodes within episodes and layers of altitude, acquires even more depth versus Potter’s outgoing flamboyance. Potter (who also plays soprano sax and bass clarinet on the record) comes through as an instinctively effusive, explorative improviser. But Metheny’s unpredictability and scopic vision at times leap into such far-flung dimensions – both stylistically and metaphysically – that the guitarist becomes matchless, and in that self-sufficient and autonomous.  

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Still, the record, also being Metheny’s first album with a tenor saxophonist in 30 years, sets off an interesting energy between the two instruments and the two temperaments. While Potter sounds more boisterous and less unforeseeable, behind Metheny’s decorous jazz bearing there again and again transpires a primal, almost childlike strata, startling in its openness and drawing from no other source apart from self. It would suffice on its own, even without Metheny’s virtuosity or compositional sophistication, but he unites this raw impulse with erudition to build a comprehensive, insular universe. This fusion of the intuitive and the acquired becomes the self-sustaining twin axis of his act where tradition sustains inspiration, and inspiration explains continuing progress in knowledge.

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Constructing his world with restrained elegance, without resorting to bombast or heavy-handed hypnosis tricks becomes akin to magic, albeit not of the usual kind. With knowledge and intuition invariably linked, at times it is the former that sets things in motion, as on closer “Breakdealer” with its tightly wound pace and an impeccable sense of tension and release. Or at other times Metheny is purely inspired, as on “Roofdogs” where you begin to wonder if the magnetic pull of the riff and the intensity of the guitar synth isn’t some prog rock band leading you into a trance. Folkish acoustic guitar gems such as “New Year” complete this expansive landscape so convincingly, you end up camping out there for longer than planned to take it all in.