Track Listing

1. Opening
2. Part One
3. Part Two
4. Part Three

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14624 in Music
• Released on: 2005-02-07
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .24 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review
For nearly 30 years, guitarist Pat Metheny and his long-time musical cohort, pianist/keyboardist Lyle Mays, have covered an incredible amount of diverse material. On their debut recording for this label, they and their international group--bassist Steve Rodby, Mexican drummer Antonio Sanchez, Vietnamese trumpeter Coung Vu, and the Swiss-born harmonica virtuoso Gregoire Maret--distil that diversity into a continuous 68-minute opus. The challenge here lies in sustaining the melodic narrative thread while keeping the sound of surprise. Thanks to Mays' evocative pianisms and Metheny's array of acoustic, electric, and synthesized guitars, the group pulls it off. For Metheny fans, this disc contains elements of his most acclaimed recordings, from the straight-ahead swing of Question and Answer and the folk-fusion of Offramp, to the Afro-Latin tinges of We Live Here, the atonally adventurous Zero Tolerance for Silence, and the Asian impressionism of Secret Story. --Eugene Holley, Jr.

Album Description
Please note that this album comes in three alternative sleeves, which will be randomly assigned.

The Way Up is a single, brilliant 68-minute piece composed by Metheny and his collaborator of 28 years, keyboardist Lyle Mays. The album is a milestone achievement for Metheny historically as well as artistically. The album feels like a vividly rendered journey, its moods shifting like scenes glimpsed from a fast-moving vehicle. Gentle pastoral moments give way to jittery urban energy; formal structure yields to breathtaking flights of improvisation.

CD Description
Acclaimed, genre-straddling jazz guitarist celebrates 30 years in the business with what he describes as his most challenging work to date, composed as a riposte to what he sees as the increasingly bland and facile nature of contemporary music. A single, 68-minute, densely composed piece divided into four movements, it dissolves the boundaries between jazz,rock, electronica and free improv.

Customer Reviews

you know it makes sense
A new Pat Metheny Group album always brings with it a knot of anticipation and expectantcy - and not a little trepidation. Seasoned campaigners have become used to acccepting that there is no such thing as a typical Pat Metheny album. But what you always do get is Jazz music in it's widest sense from a musician who understands clearly the language that is "Jazz".

Some of it may be rather unpalatable (the Derek Bailey collaborations) or almost unlistenable (step forward "Zero Tolerance for Silence") but it is always genuinely played and heartfelt.

And so it was that (thanks to a musicaholic friend of mine who must remain anonymous!) I came into the possession of an advance copy and snuck it in the cd player with several music paper reviews that were very promising but rather vague as to the content, ringing in my ears.

Five plays later and I still can't quite put down my thoughts in a way that would mean much to anyone else. It is a truly magnificent, epic, cinematic soundpiece that moves seamlessly through so many emotions - it is a journey, there is no other way of describing it.

With this album, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays have somehow managed to arrive at a place where many of their previous albums have hinted at, and there are a number of references to earlier works in there in the form of a sound or a brief motif. And it's a great place to be!

It is all compellingly listenable, consumately played, and I just can't wait to see the band perform it live - just imagine the standing ovation after 70 minutes of this amazing .....stuff!

If I have a concern, it is only this: each of the four pieces flow into each other and each piece also develops, ebbs, flows, dives, soars, meanders within itself. As a consequence it is a bit difficult to dip into it to play just a favourite piece/ track as you might with a more "traditional" album. But hey, that's surely a small price to pay when musicians are pushing boundaries, experimenting with the art form, and the result is something/ anything like "The Way Up".

Buy it with (supreme) confidence!

an album like no other
I've been a big fan of the PMG for a few years now - and it was with great excitement that I played this album on my way to work a few weeks ago - BIG MISTAKE - this isn't really music you can appreciate until you're familiar with it. Consequently, I was left feeling disappointed and a bit 'short-changed'. The 'mini-reviews' on the PMG website only fuelled my excitement and I was tempted to keep searching through the CD with the 'scan' button to find what initial reviews had indicated would be a rewarding experience.

A few weeks on and about 20 full listens all the way through - I LOVE IT - this really is an example of the sum of its 4 parts adding up to a greater whole. I own all the PMG albums, and I've noticed the more I initially 'like' something, the less long-term rewarding it actually is. This is an example of it in reverse and the more I listen the more important this album becomes. I'm now at a stage where it's the only cd I'm playing right now as everything else in comparison just doesn't inspire me in the same way.

Look at the other reviews and you'll see one guy who reviewed this twice, the first time at 2 stars and the second at 4 - and that sums up the approach you need to take with this record. Don't be too harsh on your first listen(s) and keep going back - you won't regret it!

All of the musicians excel on this recording - Metheny himself isn't as prominent as he is on his other albums, where his playing brilliance can dominate at times. If I had to single out a performance, the drumming of Sanchez is totally awesome and drives this record from start to finish.

This is a record that brings home the skill of Mays and Metheny as composers - we all know what first class musicians they are, but it is the composing that is a bigger challenge - and as my title suggests - this is a record like no other.

Emotionally this record can touch you at levels I've previously not experienced - and it leaves me wondering what on earth these guys can do next. Before that happens, this record will easily satisfy my every musical need.

Buy It - recommended without any hesitation.

New Life for Pat Metheny Group
After 2002's "Speaking of Now" - surely the most dull, lifeless and unmemorable PMG group release ever - my expectations were not high that Pat Metheny and co-writer Lyle Mays could recapture the PMG magic shown in earlier classic albums. The main problem with SON seemed to be that after some fairly dramatic personnel changes - drummer Paul Wertico out, Antonio Sanchez (drums) and Cuong Vu (trumpet) in - was that the PMG did not sound like a coherent unit, with the new musicians not integrating with the central unit of Metheny, Mays and Rodby. The compositions on "Speaking Of Now" were uninspired and nothing that hadn't been heard before on other Pat Metheny Group albums. In many ways it seemed just to be going over old ground, and doing it worse.

And now, three years later, we have "The Way Up". The change in those intervening three years has been nothing short of revolutionary. The recording is a single 68-minute piece divided into four movements, a move away from the shorter pieces of previous albums and exhibiting scant regard for commercialism or airtime. You won't be hearing this one very much on the radio.

"The Way Up" is impossible to summarise. Yes, it's jazz, first and foremost. Not easy-listening jazz, not dinner jazz, not even a jazz heard on previous PMG recordings, but a type of jazz heard all too rarely these day : ambitious jazz. Music from the front line. Jazz from the edge. But it's not some awful, experimental atonal racket. It's music of sheer beauty.

Led by Metheny, all the musicians (joined on this outing by harmonica virtuoso Gregoire Maret) play passionately throughout, and there's an astonishing coherence to the way they interact. Metheny, as ever, is the guiding light; Mays' piano and keyboards, on this recording, are more subtle and less to the fore. Rodby's bass is as thunderous and as expressive as ever, while Sanchez drums with a ferocity and power that is truly stunning. He's put power back into the group.

The music itself is dense, complex and so difficult to assimilate on first hearing that you really HAVE to play this CD at least ten times to appreciate it all. It's worth the effort, because what at first seems strange and unfamiliar suddenly grabs hold of you and won't let go. The grand themes which Metheny and Mays are so good at creating are fewer here, but more subtle. The rest is imaginative, powerful, beautifully played improv-based jazz. The music takes us through urban landscapes, on a subway journey through the heart of the city, emerging from darkness into the sunlight of pastoral, tender moments of calm and tranquility.

Of the four movements, none can really be singled out as superior to any other, but Part 3 is perhaps the most interesting and varied musically. But the CD is really more than a sum of its four parts, and you really, really must listen to it on your own, preferably with headphones, and not have it on as background music.

I'd be very surprised if this CD didn't earn the PMG yet another Grammy. I love this CD, and I feel genuinely excited when I press the "Play" button. I haven't felt that way about a CD in a long time. Go buy it.