80/81 is a double album by jazz guitarist Pat Metheny recorded over four days in May 1980 and released on ECM later that year. Metheny leads a quartet comprised of the rhythm section of Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette, with saxophone duties alternating between Dewey Redman and Michael Brecker.
Metheny toured in the U.S. in fall 1980 with a quartet including Redman, Haden and drummer Paul Motian.[1] In the summer of 1981, he toured Europe with the full 80/81 lineup featured on the album.[2]
In a review for AllMusic, Richard S. Ginell wrote that "Metheny's credibility with the jazz community went way up with the release of this package", and called the album "a superb two-CD collaboration with a quartet of outstanding jazz musicians that dared to be uncompromising at a time when most artists would have merely continued pursuing their electric commercial successes."[3]
In an article at Between Sound and Space, Tyran Grillo called the album a "still-fresh sonic concoction", and noted that "With 80/81, Pat Metheny took one step closer to his dream of working with The Prophet of Freedom (Ornette Coleman) (a dream he finally achieved with 1985's Song X)". He concluded: "Like much of what Metheny produces, 80/81 is wide open in two ways. First in its far-reaching vision, and second it its willingness to embrace the listener. Like a dolly zoom, he enacts an illusion of simultaneous recession and approach, lit like a fuse that leads not to an explosion, but to more fuse."[7]
JazzTimes included the album in an article titled "10 Best Jazz Albums of the 1980s: Critics' Picks", in which Philip Booth stated: "Enlisting four of the musicians he most admired... the 26-year-old guitarist successfully translated the sound in his head to beautifully open, airy, sometimes urgent recordings."[8]
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