Pat Metheny
Bright Size Life

Let's talk about "Bright Size Life", the first solo album of the just twenty-one-year-old Pat Metheny, the smiling legend from Missouri. The line-up features the illustrious participation of a very young Jaco Pastorius and drummer Bob Moses; the trio formula gives lightness and freshness to the sound: Pat has the exclusive on the harmonic choices and purposes, the rhythm section gently accompanies the guitar's discourse, supporting it and never weighing it down.
The album therefore presents itself as a valid and (apparently maintained) promise of class and refinement.

Right from the initial notes of the opening track, "Bright Size Life", which lends its title to the album, one is struck by the incisive personality and originality of the "style", the phrasing, the ever-pressing quest for innovative melodic paths far from any pre-existing canon. The term 'search' is not the most appropriate: Pat doesn’t seek, his is a conscious and deliberate use of the instruments of his compositional vein, it is as if he wisely exploits ancestral and personal knowledge. Hence, songs like "Sirabhorn" and "Unity Village" appear, wonderful experiments of a style that seemed to show its solid foundations right from the debut. Following is "Missouri Uncompromised", which reconfirms the vibrancy and freshness of Methenian phrasing: the ear finds new shores on which to land and refresh itself.

Metheny's music seems in perfect analogy with the great history of Music, from primordial rhythms to refined sounds that recall the seventies avant-garde and progressive, and I refer to "Midwestern Nights Dream": barriers between genres and eras no longer exist, rather everything is offered in maximum freedom and freshness. Fundamental is the support of Pastorius, for the bass lines that perfectly reveal the depth of such a promise of fusion (the times with Weather Report had not yet arrived).

In such a vibrant wave of energy, the jazz lesson (which Pat learns from masters such as Gary Burton or Mick Goodrick), seems to be largely absorbed, assimilated and bestowed into something enormously subjective, far from emulations or banalities: everything is new and perfectly in order, as inferred from "Uniquity Road", but especially from "Omaha Celebration".
The album closes with "Round Trip - Broadway Blues", a tribute to Ornette Coleman, the famous founder of the free jazz movement, a character very dear to our Pat, who still today does not fail to cite and pay homage.

In conclusion, "Bright Size Life" is an album you remember with a smile, like one smiles at the candid and sincere smile of a child.
The overall impression is that of childlike, adolescent beauty: fresh and untroubled. This is exactly what this album embodies: a cheerful and lively cry, a sweet and inviting catharsis.
Pat Metheny thinks and lives through his guitar, loves and is loved because he writes what he is.
Highly recommended album, and if one stops to think about what it meant to listen to all this in '75, it becomes almost indispensable in the musical culture of every good music lover.