But the forcefulness of Antonio Sanchez's drumming represents a stepping-up of energy that will be intriguing to encounter in a live show. The song-like acoustic and electric guitar dialogue over swelling cymbals, insinuating piano vamp and lazy, open-spaces theme certainly sounds pretty familiar on the opening As It Is. On the other hand, there are plenty of redeeming features here, whether you are a Metheny loyalist or a newcomer curious about the current status of a man who produced much of the best of fusion music between 1970 and today - a man entitled to a reputation easily comparable to the John McLaughlins and Weather Reports of this world. But the usual musical suspects are all here: the quiet acoustic guitar intros building against intensifying percussion, the evaporation of sonorous vocal-and-guitar harmonies into sprinting straightahead jazz solos and back again, the lyrical acoustic guitar love songs. Perhaps, with a greater openness to the compositional input of the others, Metheny's silkily phrased and delightfully freewheeling improvisations could be the bonding factor, rather than a style through which he found his best tunes more than a decade ago. A much stronger injection of African music via Bona, maybe a combination of that and the quirkier sounds of Cuong Vu. Looking at the credentials of the lineup, it's possible to glimpse all kinds of possibilities for what this talented ensemble could have sounded like instead. Whether listeners are crestfallen or relieved that the new session is, for the most part, Speaking of Then, depends on how much they need Metheny to stay loyal to what was endearing about his music a long time ago.

All of which suggests Speaking of Now ought to be a fitting title for a fresh chapter in the Metheny band's biography. Vietnamese-born trumpeter Cuong Vu, a gathering force on the New York downtown scene who considers Beethoven and Prince among his big influences (alongside a pretty audible Miles Davis), is also in the lineup. Antonio Sanchez adds muscle and energy on drums, and the gracefully sonorous African vocalist, composer and multi- instrumentalist Richard Bona, an increasingly high-profile contemporary world-music star, adds a new idiomatic breadth. But there are newcomers for this session, which suggests this somewhat becalmed band could now beat to a significantly different pulse.

The rather cheesily Jarrettish Mays is still in this one, as is bassist and co-producer Steve Rodby, who joined the group in 1981 for the legendary Offramp album for ECM (which premiered Are You Going With Me?, one of Metheny's most romantically memorable originals). This disc represents a significant rebuild of Metheny's most popular incarnation, the road-band he and his long-time piano partner Lyle Mays launched in the late 1970s.

The gathering sky pat metheny