Friday's Featured Recording 9/19/25

This Friday’s featured recording: Pat Metheny’s 80/81 
By Fritz Byers    

Music isn’t a food in the strict sense, but it lands on the senses, at least on mine, with more force than any French madeleine.  I chose the album to feature this week on Jazz Spectrum Friday, Pat Metheny’s masterful 80/81, in order to cultivate a specific and meaningful memory, and to see whether not only the memory, but also the music, holds up.  It does that, and more.      

    Hearing Pat’s bright acoustic guitar against Dewey Redman’s plangent tenor sax on the opening track, “Two Folk Songs,” triggers this memory: forty-four years ago, in May 1981, I was in that dreamy time that falls behind the school year’s final Final and graduation.  The week felt like a brief but concentrated interlude lived underwater, but with sound.  Nowhere to go, nothing to do.  Plenty of time to take a deep breath or two.  And listen to music.

    And get back to real reading.  Scanning the Boston Phoenix, I checked the jazz listings.  The neighborhood jazz club near Inman Square, which had more than once provided refuge from some of the more dispiriting moments of the last year of schooling, advertised a performance by Pat Metheny and his Quartet.  Pat, an almost exact contemporary who grew up in the same metropolitan area as I, was a legend in and around Kansas City in the early 70s, while I was still in high school.  If you were part of the music scene, you couldn’t escape the buzz about this jazz-guitar wunderkind. 

By the time I saw this advert, Pat had released five albums on everybody’s favorite genre-bending label, ECM.  His 1978 release, Pat Metheny Group, with his invaluable keyboardist and co-composer, Lyle Mays, made him a worldwide sensation.  The opening track, “San Lorenzo,” still thrills, but Pat’s precocious fusion brilliance didn’t quite come through to me as I scrambled for foot- and hand-holds in the great mountain of conventional jazz.

So I might not have gone, had I not noticed on the advertisement, in smaller letters, that his quartet included Dewey Redman.  Dewey Redman?  Like, the Dewey Redman who played with Ornette Coleman for five mind-bending years, and then sat in Ornette’s chair in the Ornette tribute project, Old and New Dreams? 

Charlie Haden on bass?  And Jack DeJohnette on drums?  Stalwarts of the avant-garde, playing with Pat Metheny?  At my neighborhood club?  Holy smokes.  

They say the great film critic Pauline Kael could remember every scene and every scrap of dialogue in every movie she ever saw, and recall it effortlessly either when writing that week’s review or talking about it decades later.  There appear to be jazz critics who can do the equivalent with concerts.  Not I – I remember being there that night, and how I felt, which was lofted from the plane we live in to somewhere altogether elsewhere.  

I know I had never heard saxophone played the way Dewey played that night.  I told the friend I’d dragged along, for whom this was the first jazz concert, “Dewey is in a weird head tonight.”  I said it offhand, without recognizing the odd imagery of the phrase.  It remained a running joke for the remaining years of our friendship.  I hadn’t known how versatilely you could use the concept of being in a “weird head” to explain something otherwise too odd for words.

And by the first intermission, I knew that Pat could do anything on guitar that he ever had a mind to do, at whatever speed and with whatever harmonies or dissonances the setting called for, twining with or fuguing against the saxophone or turning the rhythm section into something propulsive but elastic.    

Since that evening, I’ve often defaulted to that show as the first one I mention whenever I find myself involved in a “best concert you ever saw” nostalgia trip.  And it has been rushing back to mind all week as I’ve listened, over and over, to 80/81.  I didn’t know when I saw the show that the quartet (augmented by the saxophonist Michael Brecker) had recorded that album a year earlier.  But I found enough spare change to buy the album the day after the concert.  I wore it out and eventually replaced it with a successor LP that I recently handed on to my youngest daughter, along with the memories I’m sharing here.

If you listen to this week’s show, you won’t do so in the swirl of memory I’ve been buffeted by this week.  But you’ll hear some of the most exciting, engaging music ever made, by what might have seemed all those years ago to be the oddest of bedfellows.  All these years later, we know better.