Pat Metheny Watercolors CD

Personnel: Pat Metheny (guitar, 12-string guitar, 15-string harpguitar); Lyle Mays (piano); Eberhard Weber (bass); Dan Gottlieb (drums).
Recorded at Talent Studios, Oslo, Norway in February 1977.
Pat Metheny emerges on his second album, Watercolors, as an ECM impressionist, generally conforming to the label's overall sound while still asserting his own personality. As the title suggests, there are several mood pieces here that are suspended in the air without rhythmic underpinning, a harbinger for the new age invasion still in the future. Metheny's softly focused, asymmetrical guitar style, with echoes of apparent influences as disparate as Jim Hall, George Benson, Jerry Garcia, and various country guitarists, is quite distinctive even at this early juncture. Metheny's long-running partnership with keyboardist Lyle Mays also begins here, with Mays mostly on acoustic piano but also providing a few mild synthesizer washes. Danny Gottlieb is on drums, and ECM regular Eberhard Weber handles the bass. This is essentially the first album by the Pat Metheny Group per se, although the band had yet to find its direction in this somewhat diffuse showing. ~ Richard S. Ginell
Pat Metheny's WATERCOLORS is sonically a much simpler record than many of his regular group's albums, but it's nonetheless a musically engaging venture that once again challenges the parameters of modern jazz. With his longtime partner keyboardist Lyle Mays, European bassist Eberhard Weber, and drummer Danny Gottlieb, Metheny leads the listener through a galaxy of ethereal moods, dancing rhythms, and soaring melodies. Add to this the underlying theme of water, and Metheny has all the ingredients for a musical masterpiece.
As expected, the music has the European New Age quality that is imbued on most ECM discs, but Metheny's knack for creating pastoral colors forged with rich musical foundations is as strong as ever. Whether it's on dancing quartet pieces like the opening title track and the delightfully melodic "Lakes" or programmatic swathes of expression like the solo piece "Icefire," Metheny displays his signature flowing style that defines him as one of the guitar world's most gifted artists. Mays, Weber, and Gottlieb form a musical union that ebbs and flows gracefully, tastefully supporting the leader's cascading lines. Other noteworthy tracks are the mid-tempo groove piece "River Quay," a boundary-stretching improvisational suite, and the epic mood piece "Sea Song."