‘From This Place’, a cinematic album by Pat Metheny, features lyrics that still shine.

‘From This Place’, a cinematic album by Pat Metheny, features lyrics that still shine.

That fluid, clear tone; those soaring, orienting tunes. They have been discussed in relation to jazz for many years, ever since Pat Metheny made his stage debut in 1976 at the age of just 22. At 65 years old, he is a well-known figure in the music industry and the only recording artist in history to have won ten Grammy awards. With his most recent CD, From This Place, Metheny continues to travel forward in search of awe-inspiring new landscapes. Metheny says he aimed to evoke the sumptuous vistas connected to American film music in the notes he composed to go with the record. The Hollywood Studio Symphony and Metheny’s current working quartet also appear on the record to create that cinematic sound.

With elements of the itinerant nature of the Pat Metheny Group and the intense improvisational exchanges of his more recent jazz sessions, Metheny refers to his new endeavor as a “culmination”. It also ventures into atmospheres and textures that are uncommon in jazz, stretching beyond those boundaries.

The project started with Metheny’s touring quartet, but instead of getting the musicians together in a studio, as he has done in the past, to rehearse the new material. Without any rehearsals, he recorded their initial takes on these challenging pieces, and he later added orchestral accompaniment to the band’s tracks. The end product is far more expansive than your average soloist-with-strings performance. Everything is connected by the airy, windswept poetry that has always driven Metheny’s work.

For an artist, the completion of a complex endeavor such as this one is typically a happy occasion. This one has a melancholy undertone because it comes just after Metheny’s longtime keyboardist and partner Lyle Mays passed away. Its serene settings occasionally evoke the collaboration between Metheny and Mays that started decades before, carrying the spirit of that relationship into exciting, novel auditory spaces.