Song X

Song X is a collaborative studio album by American jazz recording artists Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman. It was released in June 1986 by Geffen Records.Song X is a free jazz album that was produced in a three-day recording session in 1985.

Background

The album features mutual Metheny/Coleman collaborator Charlie Haden on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums, and Coleman's son Denardo on various percussion instruments. It was recorded at The Power Station in New York City between December 12 and December 14, 1985.

A remixed and remastered version was issued on CD in August 2005, titled Song X: Twentieth Anniversary. Six unreleased tracks were added prior to the original eight songs.

Critical reception

In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau felt Metheny's mild mannered style of jazz kept the music uncluttered, calling Song X Coleman's best album of unadulterated jazz since the early 1970s: "No rock moves, and no funk, harmolodic or otherwise—it's all sweet lyricism, sonic comedy, and headlong invention."Down Beat magazine deemed it "a remarkable union of the true and the new, a fusion of the bedrock human sound of Ornette's alto with the sometimes jarring, mostly bracing electronic capabilities of Pat's guitar-synth".Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times that the experiment succeeded because both artists were masterful melodists, finding the record "less tangled and more directly songful than Mr. Coleman's recent albums with Prime Time".Song X was voted the nineteenth best album of 1986 in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll.