[rating=4.00]
This forty-minute ‘EP’, a collection of tracks previously available individually as downloads, may not supplant what could otherwise be the de rigueur live release from the recent tours of Pat Metheny, Christian McBride and Antonio Sanchez. But it does extend the dynamic of the trio in ways not capturee by the studio album released earlier this year.
The delicacies of acoustic textures as contained on “Inori” are familiar to all Pat Metheny fans. Like the muted atmospheric opening track "Tromso,” broad texture has been part of the guitarist/composer’s personal approach of most of his career. Less familiar but increasingly present is the Missourian’s penchant for music in overdrive as represented here by "Blackarm & Blackcharge," a piece that finds the Pat Metheny Trio at full throttle.
Yet this track is not noise for its own sake or dissonance included merely as a convenient foil for the melody that winds through "Traveling Fast" (which might well be a Pat Metheny Group piece from its pastoral mood right down to its title). Rather, it’s evidence of Metheny working to accommodate a broader approach to his personal conventions as well as a natural outgrowth of his work with Sanchez and McBride.
This lineup had worked on tour together at least three or four times before the one productive day in the studio last year that yielded Day Trip. The pleasure the threesome share in collaboration is palpable on that recording and here it’s most obvious on a sleek closer titled "The Night Becomes You:" Like Metheny himself, Sanchez and McBride are as restrained on this cut as they are abandoned elsewhere, a measure of their individual and collective discipline.
