Two Voices Finding Each Other in Electric Space
The first time most people heard Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny together, they were just starting to figure out how to play.
The sound here is intimate and exploratory — electric piano cycling through chords that feel almost questioning, two guitarists (well, one guitarist and one bass player thinking like one) weaving around each other with the kind of patience that comes from real friendship. Paul Bley holds the center on electric piano, warm and deliberate, while Pat Metheny's guitar and Jaco Pastorius's bass circle each other like they're having a conversation neither wants to rush. Bruce Ditmas on drums stays light, letting space breathe. There's no one driving the tempo; everyone's listening.
What makes this album historically significant isn't that it sounds finished — it doesn't, and that's part of its power. Metheny and Pastorius had just become friends in Miami, and you can hear them discovering what they could do together. This was Pastorius's first professional recording, before he became a legend, before everyone knew he could make a bass guitar sound like nothing anyone had heard before. The label was Bley's own Improvising Artists, and the whole session feels like a private jam that someone decided to document. It caught something real: two musicians at the beginning of careers that would matter enormously, learning how to listen to each other.
Their work together continued immediately after on Metheny's debut Bright Size Life (1976), which is sharper and more focused. If you want to hear Metheny and Pastorius in their full powers, that's the album. But if you want to hear them arriving, before the legend had calcified into certainty, this is where it happened.
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More by Pat Metheny
All 26 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
