I'm a fan of Metheny, but I have a hard time dealing with some of his cheesy material. This is one such album. Everything about it is cheese, the drum sound, the production, the way the piano is mic'ed. If you like Pat Metheny's cheese, then you should get this. If you're looking into buying this after listening to, I dunno, 80/81, then you should definitely look elsewhere.
I heard a song on the radio from this album and decided to buy it. There's tons to like about this record; great playing, good interplay, and solid songwriting. On those aspects, I'd give this album at least 4 stars. It's really world class stuff. However, I took off a star because the album can be (in my opinion) painfully noisy. The man behind Sao Paulo Underground is Rob Mazurek. You can look up his Wikipedia page to get an idea of his style. He seems to be big on combining seemingly unrelated activities (architecture and music for example) into one project, and electronica definitely does not scare him. The album is full of distortioned horns and keyboards, layers upon layers of… Read more
This is the first Nguyên Lê album I bought. I did so on a whim, although I had known for a while who he was, and I always appreciated his playing style.
Maghreb and Friends is a mixture (I purposely avoided the term "fusion") of Vietnamese, and, well, music from Maghreb. As far as I can tell, Maghrebi music is itself a mixture of Arabic and African music. I won't pretend to know if it's east or west African, or Lebanese instead of Egyptian. So basically, there are some songs that have an Arab feel, some have an African feel, and some have an Asian feel.
The really impressive thing is it works. The styles never clash, and none of the songs feel out of place. The… Read more
