01	Imaginary Day						10:11
	02	Follow Me						05:56
	03	Into the Dream						02:27
	04	A Story Within a Story						08:01
	05	The Heat of the Day						09:44
	06	Across the Sky						05:13
	07	The Roots of Coincidence						07:48
	08	Too Soon Tomorrow						05:47
	09	The Awakening						09:28

URL: http://www.patmethenygroup.com "Pat Metheny Group"
URL: http://www.patmetheny.com "Pat metheny"


Imaginary Day
Date of Release Oct 7, 1997
Styles Post-Bop, Jazz-Pop, Contemporary Jazz, Crossover Jazz

More than ever, the Pat Metheny Group is into creating thick, exotic, electronic sonic landscapes, and Imaginary Day goes even further out on the cutting edges of technology and global influences than its predecessors. The floating Metheny group signature is often present, but with radically reworked textures, and Brazil seems to be off his international itinerary, replaced by whiffs of repetitive Iranian folk music, Balinese gamelan music and other global influences. Indeed, Metheny only sounds something like his familiar soft-focused self on "A Story Within the Story," tplaying what amounts to a fine hard bop solo, and the song-like "Across the Sky." At all other times, he expands his sonic palette on various guitar synthesizers and newly minted guitar mutations, at one point assigning an entire solo piece, "Into the Dream," to the 42-string "pikasso guitar," which sounds like a glittering African zither. "The Roots of Coincidence" is a total departure for the group, a gleefully hard-edged, out-and-out rock piece with thrash-metal and techno-pop episodes joined by abrupt jump cuts. Along with his core lineup of Lyle Mays, Steve Rodby and Paul Wertico, Metheny also includes the duo of multi-instrumentalists Mark Ledford and David Blamires adding various horns and things, and four top-line percussionists - Mino Cinelu, Dave Samuels, Glen Velez and Don Alias - replacing departing member Armando Marcal. Through all the experiments, the Metheny Group's music remains uplifting, intelligent, and always accessible to the casual and attentive ear in the late '90s, even as it becomes more portentous. The "words" on the cover art and booklet are written in some kind of strange Esperanto alphabet, with symbols and objects replacing each letter, but there are enough translations in plain English to get you through. - Richard S. Ginell


Pat Metheny - Guitar (Acoustic), Guitar (Electric), Guitar (Synthesizer), Producer, Synth Guitar
David Blamires - Guitar (Acoustic), Trumpet, Violin, Guitar (Electric), Mellophonium, Recorder, Vocals, Mellowphone, Guitar (Baritone)
Glen Velez - Percussion
Don Alias - Percussion
Mino Cinelu - Percussion
Rob Eaton - Engineer, Associate Producer, Mixing
Ted Jensen - Mastering
Mark Ledford - Trumpet, Flugelhorn, Trumpet (Bass), Vocals
Lyle Mays - Piano, Keyboards, Producer
Steve Rodby - Bass, Bass (Electric), Producer, Bass (Acoustic)
Paul Wertico - Drums
David Oakes - Associate Producer, Technical Coordinator
Pat Metheny Group - Performer
David Sholemson - Project Coordinator
David Samuels - Percussion
Latifah Azhar - Photography
Pete Karam - Assistant Engineer

2001 DVA Warner Brothers 46791
1997 CS Warner Brothers 46791
1997 CD Warner Brothers 46821


1.
s. - shaker, cymbal rolls and wood ens.
paul - drums, metal and wood ens.
mino - percussion
dave keyboards, metal and wood ens.
steve - acoustic bass, me tal a(metheny/mays)
pat - fretless classical guitar

"As one of our goals for this record, Lyle (Mays) and I wantedto come up with a vehicle for the fretless classical guitar, a new instrument that I have been practicing on over the last couple of years.Wewere recalling our recent concert tour to Indonesia and a gamelan concert we attended there. It was an ensemble of 25 Indonesian musiciansplaying on metal instruments, and it was one of the tightest, most well organized ensemble sounds we had ever heard. I suppose we thought we could draw some influence from that, in that our focus on ensemble playinghas also been a priority over the years, and there were things about what they were doing that paralleled our thing even though we draw from different musical vocabularies.So that was the starting place for that tune; us wanting to com

2.
"If we think of "Imaginary Day" as this album's overture, then "Follow Me" is like once you've entered this new landscape, this piece sets the tone. It's a tune that evolves over its five-minute life, keeps getting thicker and thicker, and does a lot of the things that the group has always been good at, in terms of dynamic building. The theme itselfis based on a melody that can be played on any conventional guitar using only natural harmonics, which are sort of buried inside the standardguitartuning itself. By 'harmonics,' I mean the resonant notes that are embedded in any string; they exist at the half-way point, the quarter-way point, etc., and they are the building blocks of the overtone series."
"Like most guitar players, I find something weirdly attractive about playing harmonics. We all seem to gravitate toward them. When you get a guitar, one of the first things you do is figure out where the harmonicsare and play them every now and then - it just feels good when you do it. This is a whole m

3.
"It serves as an introduction to the following track, and it's played entirely on the 42-string pikasso guitar. There are no overdubs, just a solo piece. One of the great features of the instrument is that you canmake it sound as if there are two or three people playing; it allows you to create that illusion. There's a special tuning that I've developedthat has the guitar part of the instrument tuned very low, and the higher, ringing strings tuned very high, so you get a complete range of tones that aren't far away from the range of the piano."

(metheny)

pat - solo 42 string pikasso guitar

4.
Probably the one tune that sounds most like the conventional "pmg" sound, with guitar and piano playing the melody, acoustic bass playing a fairly complicated line, Paul (Wertico) playing a more-or-less even eighth-notes beat that's led by the cymbals. It's based on a blues-type form, but it's in some weird time signature. I didn't even think about it, I just wrote it out as a bunch of quarter-notes. It ends up being four bars of Y/? time and a bar of U/?, that's the basic beat. It was a chance to have one tune on there that's got a long guitar solo with what I call narrative playing that's more connected to the jazz guitar tradition. It also features a first for us, an improvised trumpet solo by Mark Ledford. In addition to being a fantastic singer/multi-instrumentalist, he's one of my favorite young trumpet players, with an incredible sound and an almost Freddie Hubbard-like conception. His solo functions as a story within the story."

solo, vocals
david b. - melodica, vocals
mino - percussion
pian

5.
"A very complex, uptempo piece that has connections to Iranian folk music, flamenco and this imaginary music we were trying to dream up to go with our imaginary day. We wanted to find a playing form that had several arcs in it, like you find in flamenco music with things building andbuilding and building to a peak, and then it calms back down again. That basic structure was what we were looking at as a goal, but to have apiano solo and a guitar solo that follow each other with this long arcbuilt into it, with a complex time structure. Compositionally, it may be the most involved tune on the album, or one of them."

l rolls
glen- riq
mino - percussion, wave drum, claps
dave s. - shak er, cymbaticbass, cello
paul - drums, claps
mark - vocals
david b.- v ocals
guitarsynth
lyle - acoustic piano, keyboards, claps
ste ve - acous(metheny/mays)

pat - acoustic sitar guitar, nylon string guitar,


6.
A ballad featuring conventional electric guitar, which is rare on this album. There's only this song and "A Story Within The Story" that feature the electric guitar sound that most people probably associate with me (played here on the recently released Ibanez Metheny signature model). Pretty much everything else on the record is some exotic instrument or synth guitar or weird acoustic guitar.
"This tune has an unusual form, with an introduction that's never repeated before setting up this theme that does recur throughout the piece. But it has a different structure than our normal tunes. Many of our songs use the a-a-b-a form; this one, I don't even know if i could write down what it is - it just starts and keeps going. And the playing form has a different kind of bridge than what we normally write. In that sense it reflects a lot of Lyle's interest in having tune forms that aren't conventional song forms. Wealways try to find a balance between those two things. I'm always looking, regardless of how compos


7.
"I think this will be a stand-out on the album, and probably within our entire recorded output. It unfolds over a couple of minutes into something that would sound appropriate on a modern thrash-metal album, for lack of a better term. We've never gotten into that zone on a Group album, although the capacity for that to happen has certainly always been there. Compositionally, I think it's our best work on the record. Over its almost eight minutes it goes through a whole range of moods and dynamic points and very abrupt changes from one thing to the next. More than anything, it really rocks, which has always been part of our potential that I don't think we've ever really captured on a recording until this track.
"This is another tune that began with the idea of it being avehicle for a new guitar sound; the particular sound I use on this track is a combination of a bunch of things layered together, but it's allrevolving around the vg-8. The synth bass that starts the whole thing becomes the ostinato figure


8.
"A ballad I wrote as we were making the record. There was a point where the album seemed that it might be a little relentless, with a lot of stylistic jump-cutting. We needed something to let things settle for a minute. I wrote this over a couple of nights of staying late in the studio after everyone else had gone, then played it for everybody, and we just recorded it in the middle of everything. It turned out to be just what the record needed toward the end, before we moved on to the final, long part of the story."
id b. - mellophone
mino - percussion
dave s. - cymbal rolls
d keyboards
steve - acoustic bass
paul - drums
mark- flugelhorn
dav(metheny )

pat - nylon string acoustic guitar
lyle- acoustic piano an


9.
"The main thematic material was something I'd come up with - really the ONLY thing I'd come up with - from before the time Lyle and I started working on this project that actually ended up on the record. It's an odd combination of an almost-Irish melody with an almost-Moroccan rhythmpattern. Lyle used it as a starting point for his melodic development skills. The whole second section that's based on my melody is almost like his variation on it.
"The effect of the whole thing at the end of the record is a wake-up call; it's been this long journey, this long dream; you've gone to all these different places and this really feels like you're back on earth. It also
features a great Lyle solo."


ls
mino - percussion
glen - fram drum
dave s. - shakers, cymb alrolls
mark - trumpet, vocals
david b. - recorder, mellophone, trumpet, vocayle -acoustic piano and
keyboards
steve - acoustic bass
paul -d r ums(metheny/mays)

pat - acoustic guitars, acoustic sitar guitar, tiplel