Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman
Song X

When they told me that Pat and Ornette had recorded something together, I was stunned. I really didn't expect it. The point is, I had always considered Ornette a kind of sacred monster, a revolutionary. And I had always considered Metheny's music a bit like a porn movie soundtrack, extremely refined, but still always that (not to belittle porn as a film genre, heaven forbid, as a fan like me who also watches the auteur ones in black and white). Then if jazz was the music of the brothels in the '20s, fusion was that of porn movies in the '70s (it always revolves around sex, as you well know).

Anyway, I don't want to stray too far from the topic. The collaboration in question can indeed be defined as exceedingly bizarre, but not too much if you consider that Pat also collaborated with Derek Bailey. And moreover, there's also Charlie Haden on bass and Jack Dejohnette on percussion, not peanuts here.

And indeed, the finished product, in my opinion, is something truly impressive and original. I think that perhaps it might bewilder the typical Pat Metheny fan or seem like some easy listening thing to the extreme Ornette Coleman fan. But for me, who is ultimately neither one nor the other, it's simply perfect. And it's not at all trivial, because all the ingredients were there on paper to form something grotesque, like a pineapple pizza from the American chain Pizza Hut.

Ornette on saxophone is an authentic dragon. He blows out all the madness he has in his guts; he already saw at the end of the sixties that Bebop harmony was limited, and he radically modernized it. Because he's a real coyote, and too soft sounds seem false to him. Because he knows that true beauty lies in the dissonant sound.

Pat is a dragon too, but in a different way. He grinds out a lot of notes, and not so dissonant. The guitar solo taken to the extreme. Stuff that often disorients me because it seems like he's just running but ultimately stays still. But who would have thought that he would be so at ease with free jazz. Mystery. For me, this was the album with which I reevaluated him from scratch.

This gem came out in 1985 and was re-released in an expanded version in 2005. Accattatev'illo snob jazzists. But also you, who usually do not listen to jazz and want to have a truly bizarre record at home. Beautiful and bizarre at the same time, challenging the classic beauty standards. All this useless beauty.