Jazz for aficionados

I wonder if CTI will remaster their back catalog...

Acman - I'm having a problem with Allmusic as well as All About Jazz.  They don't like I'm running AdBlocker but when I do disable for their sites get buried with pop up ads.  If you have album/track references for those samples I might be able to find them on Spotify.  

The story I repeated about Zero Tolerance was from an Amazon reviewer. 

Pat's definitely an experimenter and innovator...would be a mistake to dismiss him as a new agey/smooth jazz player.  

****Pat’s definitely an experimenter and innovator...would be a mistake to dismiss him as a new agey/smooth jazz player. ****

Exactly! Welcome to the Metheny admiration club 😍; the guy is a fantastically creative musician with a very wide range. While I, myself, have used the term "new agey" to describe some of his music, it was not meant as dismissive in any way and was used simply as a way to describe, for lack of a better term, one aspect of the flavor of some of the music that he is most known for; and, I would never call any of his music "smooth jazz" as I would describe that genre.

Imo, the "Acid Kiss" performance is absolutely fantastic; thanks for that Acman3! Cuong Vu is a very impressive trumpet player with a very interesting palette of tonal colors with his use of note bends, growls and other "vocal" sounds. He does this with the technical control and tone integrity of the conservatory-trained player that he is. Most importantly, he passes the acid test (pun) for any improviser, the ability to sustain the feeling that the solo is going somewhere with a minimum of notes; a particularly difficult thing to do when the "tune" doesn’t have an obvious harmonic framework that "leads" the listener’s ear forward. Notice that I said "improviser", not, "Jazz player"; I will leave it to others to decide for themselves whether this is "Jazz" or not. It is for me and meets my criteria for it; but, I don’t really care, I think it’s really good music. Not easy listening and a little unsettling; but really good.

****Maybe Frogman can weigh in with some music theory based description of what they are doing.****

"Acid Kiss" is, in the most basic sense, no different than most other "tunes" and a jazz performace of it: there is the statement of a melody, the repetition of the melody followed by improvised solos, and ending with a return to the melody. In this case, there is no obvious harmonic underpinning; it is only implied by the melody. Likewise, the rhythm or pulse is also implied and there isn’t an obvious "beat" until much later in the performace. The melody (tune) is heard at the very beginning as played by the trumpet. In the repetition of the melody Vu begins to improvise while sticking very close to the tune’s very simple outline and he continues to improvise while straying farther and farther away from the tune until 3:31 when he starts hinting at the melody again until 3:51 when Metheny joins him to make an obvious return to the melody in unison with Vu. It is during this unison melody interlude that drummer Ted Poor starts to define the rhythm and starts to lay down an obvious beat for the first time . At 5:00 Metheny solos over what is now essentially a 4/4 Rock rhythm. At 7:20 Vu reintroduces the melody while Metheny continues to solo and then "creeps" back in to join Vu with another unison statement of the melody. I love the way they end the tune: one final solo statement of the melody by Vu with some of the raunchiest and most interesting sounds I have heard come out of Metheny’s guitar synthesizer "accompanying" the melody and one final percussion statement by Poor.

This is is the kind of music that may sound like noise to some listeners and, in fact, the players would probably not object to the term "noise" being used to describe ONE aspect of this music. Fantastic noise, imo.

Frogman - 
Thank you very much for those descriptive paragraphs capturing Cuong Vu's trumpet playing and the "Acid Kiss" song structure.  It rounds out the listening experience for me.   I liked Acid Kiss (really, the whole LP) but specifically what about it ? and why??  As a "word guy" (lots of years doing technical writing) it's frustrating not to have the requisite vocabulary to talk (other than vaguely) about what we're hearing.    "Writing clarifies thought", someone said.  Related to this, your words help "objectify" the "subjective" experience.  Good stuff.  THANKS again.  

Regarding PM...I don't consider myself a newcomer to the PM admiration society BUT haven't paid much attention to what's he's done since, say, "Road to You".  Have just a couple of things that he did after that but definitely out of touch.  Nice to be connecting again and finding more depth than I would have anticipated.