Pat Metheny Bright Size Life CD

Personnel: Pat Metheny (electric & 12-string guitars); Jaco Pastorius (bass); Bob Moses (drums).
Recorded at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg, Germany in December 1975. Includes liner notes by Gary Burton.
Pat Metheny's debut studio album is a good one, a trio date that finds him already laying down the distinctively cottony, slightly withdrawn tone and asymmetrical phrasing that would serve him well through most of the swerves in direction ahead. His original material, all of it lovely, bears the bracing air of his Midwestern upbringing, with titles like "Missouri Uncompromised," "Midwestern Nights Dream," and "Omaha Celebration." There is also a sole harbinger of radical matters way down the road with the inclusion of a loose-jointed treatment of Ornette Coleman's "Round Trip/Broadway Blues," proving that Song X did not come from totally out of the blue. Besides the debut of Metheny, this CD also features one of the earliest recordings of Jaco Pastorius, a fully formed, well-matched contrapuntal force on electric bass, though content to leave the spotlight mostly to Metheny. Bob Moses, who like Metheny played in the Gary Burton Quintet at the time, is the drummer, and he can mix it up, too. ~ Richard S. Ginell
BRIGHT SIZE LIFE, his first solo album, is an anomaly in the Pat Metheny discography. Rather than inaugurating a new era in his music, it celebrates the end of another. Of the eight superb arrangements that make up BRIGHT SIZE LIFE, only the gentle ballad "Unity Village" (an overdubbed duet between electric 6- and 12-string guitars) made it to the Pat Metheny Group repetoire. And yet, some 20 years after documenting the music of his first working group, BRIGHT SIZE LIFE endures as among the finest, freshest trio recordings in the history of jazz.
Metheny's enormous lyric gifts were first revealed during a two-year stint as the second guitarist (on electric 12-string, behind Mick Goodrick) in Gary Burton's group, where he developed a powerful rapport with drummer Bob Moses. And like Burton, Metheny's attraction to modern jazz was balanced by a deep feeling for all aspects of cultural Americana; thus, echoes of country music, Presbyterian hymn books and the blues resonate in the title tune and "Omaha Celebration."
But it is the near-telepathic empathy between Metheny and fretless bass guitar innovator Jaco Pastorious that defines the creative tension on BRIGHT SIZE LIFE. With powerhouse drummer Moses providing a fluid cymbal-inflected polyrhythmic underpinning, the yin and yang of these two string players meld into one greater voice. On "Missouri Uncompromised" and "Round Trip/Broadway Blues" their collective interplay at exuberant swing tempos is phenomenal, as Pastorious instinctively rounds out every Metheny phrase with elegant contrapuntal figures. Yet for all his melodic revelry, Pastorious and Moses never stop grooving or drop the tempo for a second, and Metheny responds with some remarkably modern guitar notions, equal parts Jim Hall and Ornette Coleman. Still, the trio's finest moments occur on the moody, rhapsodic "Midwestern Nights Dream," where Pastorious' gong-like melodies ring out over Metheny's tolling chords like some spectral spirit of lost youth.