Phase Dance

"Phase Dance" was written by Metheny and Mays and is 8:18 on Pat Metheny Group, recorded in January 1978 with Egan on bass and Gottlieb on drums. Bob Freska of Something Else! says it was probably the first tune Metheny and Mays wrote together, though accounts differ; Metheny plays a Guild acoustic in Nashville tuning for the intro and the melody and a Gibson ES-175 for the solo, and Mays solos on acoustic piano. It opened virtually every group concert from late 1977 through the Letter from Home tour, which ended in late 1989, was briefly retired in the 1990s and came back on the 2002 Speaking of Now tour; Freska calls it a musical manifesto, if you will. A live version of 8:03 is on Travels (1983), recorded in 1982.

Setlist.fm counts 116 performances on the Pat Metheny artist page, or 95 by a search snippet of the same statistics, so the count is contested. No comment from the writers on its meaning, chart history, video, covers or samples were found.