Travels [Live]

Pat Metheny | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (February 29, 2000)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Format: Live
• Label: Polygram Label Group
• ASIN: B0000262UV
• Also Available in: Audio Cassette  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,311 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

No Description Available.
Genre: Jazz Music
Media Format: Compact Disk
Rating:
Release Date: 29-FEB-2000

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wholly remarkable live album, June 6, 2001

By 

Gavin Wilson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Travels (Audio CD)

Recorded less than a year after the magnificent 'Offramp', 'Travels' is proof that the PMG were on a creative high. Music was pouring from Metheny and Mays. Extraordinarily for a live album, over half the tracks were entirely new and have not been heard, before or since, on any studio album. And none of them are the hastily put-together "we only met five minutes before the recording" jams that characterise some jazz albums, even some of Pat's later output.

No, every piece here is intricately worked out but allows space for improvisation. Pat said in an interview soon after this album's release that he preferred this version of 'Are You Going With Me?' to the 'Offramp' original. Both have their merits. Both are brilliant. To give you an idea of the way that the use of music has evolved in the 19 years since this was recorded, the live version here also features on a new double CD of chill-out music entitled 'Sunset Ibiza'.

Track #3, 'Goodbye', is a sublime piece of music, similar in mood to 'Offramp's 'Au Lait', and features some Brazilian singing from Vasconcelos, who seemed to spend every concert squatting by his gong, if the album photos are to be believed!

There are two delightfully simple tunes on this album -- 'Farmer's Trust' and 'Travels' -- which are gorgeously executed duets by Metheny and Mays, with the rest of the band in the background. They are almost love poems, a high point in the musical understanding between Mays and Metheny.

If this album has any lows, or rather, any not-quite-so-highs, it is that the two tracks from the 'Pat Metheny Group' album -- 'Phase Dance' and 'San Lorenzo' -- add little to the originals. But they are not lesser versions, and they go a long way towards justifying this album's claim to be a representative compilation of the PMG's early works.

It's almost impossible for any artist to create two masterpieces in succession, but the PMG achieved this with 'Offramp' and 'Travels'. The French might call this farewell to drummer Dan Gottlieb 'Travaux'.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The great virtual road trip, November 13, 2004

By 

Noble Books (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Travels (Audio CD)

When the Pat Metheny Group came to the University of Virginia in 1984, I was one of the first students to get to the ticket line, not because I'd ever heard of them, or even of jazz-rock fusion, but because the man I had a deep crush on said, casually, they were pretty good and he thought he might go. He waited a couple of days, figuring no one but him had ever heard of Metheny--I did not. I got a ticket--he did not. I think he may have forgiven me by now. The man, who is now my husband partly because of that evening, ate dinner with me anyway, and walked me rather generously to the concert hall, and then left me there at the door to encounter something I'd never heard before. The group had chosen a relatively small classical concert hall with several tiers of opera seating. Chamber quartets usually played there, and Sir Ian McKellen had performed soliloquys one night...not the usual rock concert scene at the basketball stadium, for sure. And it was packed to the rafters. So I squeezed myself into a solo seat between two tweedy turtlenecked junior professors and hoped for the best.

And got much more--if you've heard the music anywhere, you know it can send you on a trek through the darkest Amazon looking for rare orchids or jar you back to your fresh awkward youth with the remembered offkey fumbles of a junior high school marching band on its first day of outdoor practice. I shut my eyes halfway through and let the music peel everything else away.

After that concert, I played the Travels album, front to back, back to front, daily for more than two years. I think I wore out a couple of needles on it. That music got me through physical chemistry, it got me through the costuming course and the late-night painting sessions that were supposed to be my distraction from p-chem, and it ended by seeping into my bones.

The loose-jointed music is perfect for writing to, you can see the great road picture flowing from your fingers as you listen. Some of the pieces are dark and sensual, some unexpectedly light-hearted, some practical and streamlined like the polished chrome roadside diner from the late '50s with the real pot roast dinner that you suddenly spot on your cross-country journey, some wistful at the knowledge that it's time to pack up again and head back to the Greyhound station. All of it is uniquely heartwood American, and absolutely none of it is worn down with false flagwaving cliches. It is brainy, casual, serious, and freewheeling in the same moment, conscious without being self-conscious, and it stirs the faint breeze of hope for America, the real thing, in a way that no Homeland Security propaganda anthem ever will. Go and get this album, now that it is on CD and won't warp like my old loved-to-death LPs. Then take your seat on the bus and start writing your own great American road trip.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yes, I am going with you..., January 13, 2008

By 

B. Allen (southern CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Travels (Audio CD)

1978 was a transformational year for me. Having nearly gotten the bad taste of high school out of my mouth, I was, like most teenagers on the verge of adulthood, in search of some deeper meaning and substance in my life. Of course I didn't realize any of that at the time when, on a lazy, summer afternoon, my friend said that he had a new album that he wanted me to listen to.

I was a rock fan then and so was he, so I was expecting the usual Zep or Doors when I suddenly heard the opening notes to San Lorenzo. That album was of course, the self titled "Pat Metheny Group" and it was the only music that we listened to for the entire day. It was, for me, an epiphany. To say that the next forty minutes changed my life sounds like hyperbole but, in truth, my concept of music and how I listened to it changed forever on that sunny afternoon. Metaphorically, I had just sat down at the table. smelled the food and realized just how hungry I was. Hungry for more...The world of Jazz opened up to me on that day, which is not to say that I had never heard Jazz before. On the contrary, my father had many Jazz albums, but they were, well, they were my fathers... That was stuff that he listened to (and with respect to my father and those talented musicians, such as Sinatra, Art Tatum, Buddy Rich and Count Basie, it is part of the music that I now also listen to)... But these guys just blew me away. They touched me ineffably with their depth of feeling and gift for melody. They touched me in a way that those musicians of my fathers age, talented though they were, could not. It probably helped that Pat and I were both mid-western boys and that he wasn't too much older than I was, and that, as I was to later discover, we both loved Jimmy Hendrix...

A few years later that same friend called me up and said that Pat was coming to town and that we should go see him. Pat wasn't the icon then that he is now of course and the tickets were pretty cheap and not at all hard to get, at least not in my little town. The show was in, of all places, a Cathedral. The irony was palpable as it turned out to be a near religious experience. That tour was part of the band's "Travels" that were later, to comprise this album. I listened to that album everyday as soon as I got my hands on it. Listened to it until you could nearly see through it.

The t-shirt that I got at that concert has also long since worn out, and of course there have been other great albums and their associated concerts (most notably Still Life-(talking) in 87' and We Live Here in 95') but none have affected me so deeply and completely as that first concert in that darkened Cathedral. To hear these cuts now on disc... it takes me back to that hallowed, ethereal, place, all those years ago and I get the same chill down my back as I did that night.

I confess that I have not loved every note that Pat has composed. Indeed he has taken some paths on his journey as an artist down which I could neither follow nor comprehend, but I do respect his courage in choosing that path. Now as I think about it, all the years and all the miles in between then and now, seem a bit clearer, seem to have a little more meaning, when I listen and I smile and I weep, to this beautifully crafted music. And it becomes apparent to me that perhaps this was what the truth of the music was all about; that the travels and the path that I had unwittingly embarked on, all those years ago, While circuitous and sometimes painful, wasn't so fruitless after all.

It isn't hyperbole to say to you now that if you have never enjoyed Jazz, you should buy this album, that if you have never heard of Pat Metheny, you should buy this album, that if you are in search of something in your life and music plays any part at all in that search, then you should most definitely and without hesitation buy this album...

Thank you Pat. Thank you Lyle. Thank you Steve. Thank you Dan. Thank you Nana, and thank you, most of all, to my dear friend who opened my mind to the beauty of this music. Where ever you are, I want you to know that I think of you often and hope you are well and have had safe travels...