This is Metheny’s soul-jazz album, in which pretty, catchy melodies are delivered with a George Benson type tone over funky vamps ‘freshened’ with off-the-shelf hip-hop drum loops. However, although hip-hop is the news, at least for Metheny, the light Latin style with which he is most often associated is represented on later tracks. The sum result is as pleasant as might be expected, but there are points at which Metheny produces excellent chromatic jazz improvisations, notably on The Girls Next Door. In its surpassing tunefulness, I suppose this record could be seen as an apology for the surpassing nastiness of Metheny’s thrash-metal study Zero Tolerance For Silence, without being much more involving.
Discography
Here To Stay; And Then I Knew; The Girls Next Door; To The End Of The World; We Live Here; Episode d’Azur; Something To Remind You; Red Sky; Stranger In Town (67.07)
Metheny (g, elg, gsyn); Lyle Mays (kyb, p); Steve Rodby (b, elb); Paul Wertico (d); David Blamires (v); Mark Ledford (v, whistling, flh, t); Luis Conte (pc). NYC, 1994.
(Geffen GED 24729)
