Pat Metheny: The Unity Sessions

Pat Metheny has long been jazz’s most heroic guitarist, but he’s a guitar god with a definite and unabashed affinity for experimentation and the avant-garde. Two recent offerings from Nonesuch, The Unity Sessions and Cuong Vu Trio Meets Pat Metheny, veer toward each pole of Metheny’s identity while also underscoring the inside-outside nature of nearly everything he does. This is a complete musician.

The Unity Sessions is the audio of an immersive DVD/Blu-ray program of the same name, released last year and recorded in a small New York theater sans audience. Think of it as a live-in-studio document that captures what was one of jazz’s best working units after a surplus of road experience. Metheny’s Unity Group, which flaunts some of the stadium-jazz ideals of the Pat Metheny Group while maintaining the elastic focus of a postbop band, boasts mighty personnel in saxophonist Chris Potter, bassist Ben Williams, drummer Antonio Sanchez and utility man Giulio Carmassi. But the performances and sound provide the hooks here.