Still Life (Talking)

Pat Metheny's open-hearted odyssey through music has encompassed fleet jazz, garage rock, and avant-garde chaos, but this 1987 hit finds its most significant wrinkle in the band's increased emphasis on Brazilian accents and vocalise choruses, using three singers (including percussionist-vocalist Armando Marcal and singers David Blamires and Mark Ledford) to augment the core quartet of Metheny, keyboardist Lyle Mays, bassist Steve Rodby, and drummer Paul Wertico. Metheny by now comfortably integrates his own guitar synthesizers into Mays's seasoned electronic orchestrations, and Still Life (Talking) is by turns sunny, wistful, and kinetic. The Brazilian aesthetic gives us the lovely opener, "Minuano (Six Eight)" and colors "So May It Secretly Begin." Metheny's instinctive, American sensibility is rooted in his Plains upbringing and the prairie-wide sound that his music has always evoked. The album's best-known piece, "Last Train Home," revives the sound of electric sitar to unexpected emotional effect. --Sam Sutherland