Santiago Lara - Flamenco Tribute To Pat Metheny (2016)

A good story is always a good story, no matter who tells it. American guitarist Pat Metheny is a grandiose story inventor. With his wide epic narratives, not only for over thirty years, he has repeatedly beaten surprising bows over different playing styles of jazz, rock, folk, country, ambient, avant-garde, classical, minimal music as well as all imaginable musical ethnicities. His special sense of dramaturgical action sequences and precise sound optics are sometimes more reminiscent of a film director than a musician. No wonder that other storytellers sometimes feel the need to tell their version of Metheny's stories.
Spanish flamenco guitarist Santiago Lara is a generation younger than Pat Metheny. When the later master student of Manolo Sancúlar was born in 1984, Metheny was already a star and the album "Offramp", from which the song "James" sounds here, had already been on the market for two years. Lara has practically grown into the music of Metheny. He celebrates these Metheny originals on his richly covered flamenco table with such a self-evident self-evidence as if nothing could be closer than to depict them in this conception. Even more than flamenco. Lara keeps the pieces everything that Metheny's music has always made up. They are colorful, playful, vibrant, full of air and movement and most importantly—even in this Spanish focus—of cosmopolitan universe. Lara may gain different perspectives from the songs than Metheny, but that's what it's all about.

The pieces are taken from the albums 'Offramp', 'Still Life (Talking)', 'Letter From Home', 'Question And Answer', 'Secret Story', 'Imaginary Day', 'Metheny Mehldau' and 'Orchestrion'. So they are songs that have emerged in various lineups of the Pat Metheny Group, in the trio with Dave Holland and Roy Haynes, in the duo with Brad Mehldau and with his hydraulic and pneumatic one-man orchestrion project. It is not only due to Metheny's unmistakable handwriting, but also to Lara's strong creative will that these highly different compositions that extend from 1982 to 2010 have become a unit. A kind of suite of songs that suddenly belong inseparably together in this way.
But Lara has succeeded even more than just this. Of course, one cannot speak of a "Best Of" in eight selected compositions by a musical visionary with a bandwidth like Pat Metheny, and yet "A Tribute To Pat Metheny" - as Lara titles the album in all humility - is a comb hike over the peaks of a very special musical career. That other routes are possible, Polish singer Anna Maria Jopek proved in 2002 on her album "Upojenie", on which she provided Metheny's songs with Polish lyrics. It is incredibly exciting which angle of view gives Metheny's complete work, and which territorial translations can be found again and again. Santiago Lara's "A Tribute To Pat Metheny" does not claim to a final take, but is another offering on this variable palette.