''The Unity Sessions'' is an album by American jazz guitarist

Pat Metheny Patrick Bruce Metheny ( ; born August 12, 1954) is an American jazz guitarist and composer. He is the leader of the Pat Metheny Group and is also involved in duets, solo works, and other side projects. His style incorporates elements of progre ...

and his Unity Band: saxophonist Chris Potter, bassist Ben Williams, keyboardist

Giulio Carmassi Giuliano Giulio Giacomo Carmassi (born February 21, 1981 in Lucca, Italy) is an Italian multi-instrumentalist. Music career Carmassi has performed many different jobs in music: multi-instrumentalist, singer, film composer, arranger, producer, an ...

and drummer Antonio Sánchez. A live album in a studio setting, it was recorded with a camera crew in a black box theatre without an audience. The recording was released on DVD and Blu-Ray disc in 2015, then as a double CD in 2016.

Reception

The album received generally favourable reviews with

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

giving it a score of 80% from 4 reviews.Metacritic summary
accessed September 14, 2016 The

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...

review by Matt Collar states "Ultimately, while Metheny is the undisputed leader here, it's the thoughtful interplay of all the Unity Group's members that makes these sessions so involving". In ''

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the w ...

'' Dave Gelly wrote, "This double album, recorded at the end of a year-long tour by his Unity Band, is as polished and sophisticated as any, but moments such as the opening melody of "This Belongs to You" or the gradual unfolding of "Born" are just plain elegant". Writing for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', John Fordham observed, "there's a generally exhilarating sense of freedom here, notably in improv exchanges between the players and with Metheny's one-man-band Orchestrion machine, that testifies to how attuned constant gigging has made them".

Track listing

Personnel

– electric and acoustic guitars, guitar synthesizer, electronics, orchestrionics * Chris Potter – tenor and soprano saxophones,

bass clarinet The bass clarinet is a musical instrument of the clarinet family. Like the more common soprano B clarinet, it is usually pitched in B (meaning it is a transposing instrument on which a written C sounds as B), but it plays notes an octave bel ...

, flute, guitar *

– piano, synthesizer,

flugelhorn The flugelhorn (), also spelled fluegelhorn, flugel horn, or flügelhorn, is a brass instrument that resembles the trumpet and cornet but has a wider, more conical bore. Like trumpets and cornets, most flugelhorns are pitched in B, though some ...

, whistling, vocals * Ben Williams – acoustic and electric bass * Antonio Sánchez – drums, cajón

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Unity Sessions, The Pat Metheny live albums 2016 live albums Nonesuch Records live albums