Pat Metheny once described himself as "basically an Ornette Colemanstyle free player," meaning, I gather, someone who plays in a melodic style free of harmonic margins. Actually, Metheny's guitar style is more notable for tonal finesse than melodic ingenuity, which makes him an ideal agent for producer Manfred Eicher's ascetic vision of jazz. Under Eicher's direction, Metheny and his cohorts create intimate, temperate music that's glazed in measured and mellifluent pastels. In short, this is prototypical chamber jazz—and if somebody has to lull and wheedle the masses with it, better Metheny than Mangione.

Then again, Chuck Mangione isn't likely to indulge in recording artful solo projects, a practice Eicher actively encourages. New Chautauqua, like similar Eicher-produced efforts by Ralph Towner, John Abercrombie and Terje Rypdal, is a web work of overdubbed guitars—a bit like all those sound-on-sound touchstones that "serious" music majors rack up on their reel-to-reels. The problem with this "conversations with myself" stuff is that it doesn't allow any real exchanges: Metheny's improvisations simply overlay preset harmonic and modal patterns, and one pattern doesn't goad or coax the other. In certain cases (the title tune and "Daybreak," with their bustling progressions and musing lead lines), such a technique can make for a winning performance, though it can also just recycle laconic, deadlocked themes without a hint of evolution. Still, anything is preferable to the dirgelike, drifting atonality that mires the album's centerpieces, "Long-Ago Child/Fallen Star" and "Hermitage," in boredom. Noodling inch after noodling inch, these tracks meander, and you wait for something to jump and matter, something to jar the awful aridity.

But when that moment comes, toward the end in "Sueño Con Mexico," it doesn't jump at all: it illumines. Over a floating mesh of recurring arpeggios and wraith-like chords, Pat Metheny sketches an indelible, meditative melody line that sounds, oddly, like an overdubbed epiphany. It's one of those serenely irrational moments (e.g., Bill Evans' compelling and impellent piano solo, "Peace Piece") that springs from a profound and emotional place. And it's the one moment that pushes New Chautauqua above the level of arty monologue. (RS 300)

MIKAL GILMORE