New Chautauqua is the first solo album by Pat Metheny, recorded in Oslo in August 1978 and released by ECM in 1979. Working alone and mostly on acoustic instruments, he layered six- and twelve-string guitars, a fifteen-string harp guitar and electric bass into folk-flavoured pieces of his own. He called it "an autobiographical album. It's got a lot to do with the American Midwest. It's very open and spacious."
By then Metheny had made Bright Size Life (1976) and Watercolors (1977) for the label, as well as the first album of his quartet, the Pat Metheny Group. As ECM Reviews reports from a 1979 radio interview, fear of being typecast and encouragement from producer Manfred Eicher led him from the quartet to a solo record. The session took place at Talent Studio with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug. The title, by the same account, salutes the Chautauqua troupes that toured the Midwest playing one-night shows.
The title track opens the record with a bright, precise energy driven by syncopation, and a country twang that Metheny linked to the open spaces of his childhood. Country Poem is a brief, quiet interlude. In the ten-minute Long-Ago Child / Fallen Star the harp guitar talks with a slide line on top, moving between regret and release. Sueño Con Mexico is built on an acoustic ostinato with electric bass, Metheny weaving ornaments around it, and the closing Daybreak stacks extra guitars and bass into a hopeful finale.
Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews heard the opener and the closer as two travel diaries bookending the album. He singled out how "the 15-string harp guitar dialogues with an open slide in the lead." Not every critic was won over. In the Richmond Times-Dispatch, C.A. Bustard called it "an exercise in arrangement and effect" and concluded: "As pure music, it drifts." Elsewhere on the same site, Grillo counts the title tune among Metheny's most emblematic pieces, for the way it connects its ideas.
This CD (ECM 1131) belongs to ECM's Touchstones series, launched in 2008 to bring catalogue albums back in cardboard sleeves; this edition was issued in October 2008. The album was first released in 1979.
