80/81

Michael BreckerMichael Breckerマイケル・ブレッカー appeared on approximately 900 recordings — not just jazz, but pop and rock sessions where someone needed saxophone done right. He appeared on Pat MethenyPat Methenyパット・メセニー's 80/8180/81Pat Metheny · 1980 (1980) and released his own debut in 1987. He died of leukemia in 2007 at 57, having won 15 Grammy Awards.

80/8180/81Pat Metheny · 1980 (1980) brought Pat MethenyPat Methenyパット・メセニー together with Michael BreckerMichael Breckerマイケル・ブレッカー, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Jack DeJohnetteJack DeJohnetteジャック・ディジョネット. The double-album of long-form improvisation showed a darker side beyond the Pat Metheny Group's sunlit image.

On Pat Metheny's ECM date 80/81 (1980), two tenors stood side by side: Michael Brecker, by then a fusion and pop studio staple, and Dewey Redman, straight out of the free-jazz lineage. Pairing the studio ace with the avant-garde tenor was the whole point of the record.

Pat Metheny first heard Michael Brecker's tenor not on a jazz record but on a pop hit pouring out of a car radio at a big intersection. The two would later become close collaborators — but the introduction came over the airwaves, through pop.

Pilgrimage (2007) was the last record Michael Brecker made, cut while he was dying. Pat Metheny, who played guitar on it, said Brecker had never sounded better—that a new element, a kind of seriousness in every gesture, had entered his playing. The illness deepened it rather than thinning it out.

Dewey Redman's only credit in this database is Pat Metheny's 80/81 (1980). His son Joshua Redman, who would become one of the most celebrated tenor players of his generation, later said that whenever his father took a solo, his own playing sounded like video game music by comparison.

On 80/81 (1980), Michael Brecker — then the most in-demand studio saxophonist in New York, and heard as a fusion player — is trading with Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden, both out of the free jazz world. Pat Metheny wrote all of the material.

Michael Brecker spent more than a decade as one of the most in-demand session saxophonists in pop and jazz alike, yet didn't release an album under his own name until 1987, just before turning 40. The bassist he brought in for that belated debut was Charlie Haden.