Four short, elegant songs make up side two of As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls, a collaboration between guitarist Pat Metheny and keyboardist Lyle Mays. One of these numbers, a tribute to the late jazz pianist Bill Evans, is especially beautiful. But the main attraction here is the twenty-minute title tune that utilizes all of side one: a moody, enigmatic, ultimately quite disturbing cut whose melancholy, dread-drenched progression seems to tell some kind of story. Is it about a "close encounter" with extraterrestrials? Nuclear holocaust? The flight of the soul from the body in death?

The first movement of "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls" underscores sad, minor-key keyboard chording, an ominous bass and the clatter of wooden wind chimes with milling crowd sounds and atomic rumbling. A metallic guitar-and-autoharp encounter gives way to a lengthy, percolating passage that culminates in emphatic Tubular Bells-type riffing, churchy organ and heavenly harp. In the fourth and final section, the composition gradually "lands" on long lines of cloudy synthesized strings and ends with the eerie sound of children at play in some sort of sonic vacuum.

Throughout, the match of Mays' keyboard wizardry and Metheny's trademark shimmering guitar playing is inspired. With percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, they have created a fantastic, ambitious piece of music that bridges the gap between contemporary jazz and the New Music of such composers as Steve Reich. (RS 351)

DON SHEWEY