Customer Reviews

Till We Have Faces

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

I dont know of any other CD in my (large) jazz collection that I have more affection for. This is hard out, not for the faint-heated, joyous melodic improvising - not just patterns over chords. While it is often texturally dense, it is never inaccessible. If you like jazz at all - grab this - play it loud and listen closely. I could not recommend an album more. Great guitar - from Pat Metheny NO LESS!! wonderful muscular drumming from Terri Lynne Carrington (best female jazz drummer?) and tunes you probably know but have never heard like this. I love the version here of one of my favorite tunes - "You dont know what love is" - it is great to jam along with too.
Listen to the drum / sax intro to Angel Eyes .
Stunning Tenor, soprano and flute from Gary Thomas.

I couldn't agree more with the previous reviewer. I'm a huge fan of both Metheny (primarily his non-PMG work) and Thomas, and this pairing is perfect. Metheny has been quoted as saying that this setting him caused him to play in a way that he never had before and never has since. To my ears, Metheny's stuff on this disc is like a cross between the adventurousness he showed on Song X and the straight-ahead stuff from Question and Answer. Mind-blowing stuff.

I've never understood why Thomas isn't more well-known. I read once that he was "too 'out' for the funky cats and too funky for the 'out' cats." Listen to this disc (paricularly "It's You Or No One") and you'll understand why that may be accurate.

Of all the 300+ jazz discs I own, I can put none above this one. It's one of my all-time favorites (along with Coltrane's "Giant Steps," Derek Bailey's "Ballads," the 20th anniversary version of "Song X," Geri Allen's "The Nurturer," and an out-of-print "Sonny Rollins: The Quartets Featuring Jim Hall" disc).

Gary Thomas' angular lines and buzzsaw tone on tenor take a little getting used to, but there's no denying the power of this music. The band is stellar: Pat Metheny on guitar, Tim Murphy on piano, Ed Howard or Anthony Cox on bass, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums and Steve Moss on percussion. Carrington's blistering performance on "Angel Eyes" by itself is worth the price of the disk, but every track is a gem. Kudos to recording engineer Carlos Albrecht and mix engineer Thomas Schmid for achieving such a clear, balanced recording, and for making the bass--frequently a casualty on jazz recordings--clearly audible.