Pat Metheny – Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV) (Vinyl 2LP)

Pat Metheny unveils the latest chapter in his wildly prolific career – Side-Eye, a new setting featuring the 20-time Grammy winner accompanied by a handpicked and rotating cast of players featuring some of the most exciting and innovative new musicians on the New York scene. New album, Side-Eye NYC was recorded just before the pandemic and deftly balances a mix of stunning new originals with inventive reworkings of some of Metheny’s most beloved compositions such as “Timeline,” which originally featured Metheny performing with fellow icons Michael Brecker and Elvin Jones. Now bringing that same unmistakable spirit to a new crop of players who grew up with his music as a part of their musical heritage, Metheny’s Side-Eye seamlessly flows in his usual genre-defying way from post-organ-trio grooves to expansive mini-suite forms to simply Metheny at his most rocking.

Pat explains, “I wanted to create an ongoing platform to host a rotating cast of the newer generations of musicians who have particularly caught my interest along the way. From my earliest days in Kansas City onward, I was the beneficiary of so many older musicians hiring me, which gave me a chance to develop through the prism of their experiences and the particular demands of what their music implied.”

Metheny has given this band concept the name Side-Eye and hopes that it might become a rotating group of musicians who could come and go in different combinations. So far, there have been four iterations, hence the V.1-IV sub-heading on the record. Whether searingly electric, powerfully intense or deeply contemplative, highly composed or totally improvised, or even with some new-fangled contraption of his own design, there is always that unmistakable Metheny sensibility at work that has stood at the forefront of jazz for what is now approaching five decades.

LP1

1. It Starts When We Disappear
2. Better Days Ahead
3. Timeline
4. Bright Size Life

LP2

1. Lodger
2. Sirabhorn
3. Turnaround
4. Zenith Blue