Birds of a Feather: Pat Metheny’s “New Chautauqua” & John Abercrombie’s “Characters”

Sometimes an album seems so unique that you can’t imagine anything else quite like it. Sometimes you’re wrong.  After living with guitarist Pat Metheny’s 1979 recording New Chautauqua for decades as one of my favorite albums and thinking it created an aura, a mood, that no other artist had really explored, I recently (thanks to…