Pat Metheny: Song X : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In 1993, saxophonist Ornette Coleman described Song X to me as an album of music with "no brand or race or style or color. Pat immersed himself in what I was doing. I immersed myself in what Pat was doing. And a third thing came out." That "thing" was a hot, knotty union of Pat Metheny's guitar modernism and Coleman's freed jazz. Two decades later, Song X is still an exhilarating challenge, powered by bassist Charlie Haden and drummers Denardo Coleman and Jack DeJohnette. Some of the wildest playing here is Metheny's, like the helter-skelter fret runs in "Endangered Species." Coleman, in fact, brings much of the strange beauty, disassembling the themes in "Kathelin Gray" and "Trigonometry" with honed melodicism on his wiry alto. This reissue comes with six outtakes from the 1985 sessions, including one, "Police People," in which Metheny sounds like Jerry Garcia in bebop bliss.