From This Place is lush, airy, elegant, and graceful, framed by adventurous harmonics, dark drama, and illuminating melodic invention.
This record features ten compositions by Pat Metheny, who is joined by long-time drummer, Antonio Sanchez, Malaysian/Australian bassist Linda May Han Oh, and British pianist Gwilym Simcock as well as the Hollywood Studio Symphony conducted by Joel McNeely. Meshell Ndegeocello (vocals), Gregoire Maret (harmonica), and Luis Conte (percussion) are special guests on From This Place, Metheny’s first album of new material since 2014’s Kin…

The '90s found Chicago's lineup minus drummer Daniel Seraphine, but with guitarist Dawayne Bailey, who had been a sideman, a full-fledged member. It also found the group at the closest thing to a career crisis in a decade. This album sold poorly and spun off only one Top 40 hit, "Chasin' the Wind," despite containing some typical, if not outstanding, material in tunes like "You Come to My Senses" (which belatedly scaled the adult contemporary chart) and "Explain It to My Heart." Clearly, a new approach was in order.

The film scores of Iranian-born/U.S.-educated Nima Fakhrara (Exists, Gatchaman, The Courier) are known for their experimental bent, the product of a composer informed not only by Persian classical music but university studies in anthropology and ethnomusicology. To score William Eubank’s thought-provoking sci-fi movie, Fakhrara says he "wanted to achieve a certain sense of mystery and tension throughout the film. Our characters are being pulled and pushed in many directions, so the music had to feel the same. We also wanted keep the audience guessing throughout the film by scoring scenes in unconventional ways.” Fakhrara’s expansive sensibilities also drive him to craft new instruments from industrial scraps. Here he built "three instruments that became the signature sounds of the project: the Pagoda (forged from a high-tension insulator), the Transmission, and the Steel Marimba…