Sunday, July 26, 1998

Jim Hall’s guitar gently wails
By Peter B. King
Post-Gazette Staff Writer

When Jim Hall and Pat Metheny take the stage at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild Saturday and next Sunday to record a CD of guitar duets for Cleveland-based Telarc records, Metheny will need no introduction. Hall, on the other hand, might.

Dyed-in-the-beret jazz fans know, of course, about this master of understatement’s contributions to the music for more than 40 years — his work as a sideman with Jimmy Giuffre, Sonny Rollins and Paul Desmond, his duo recordings with Bill Evans and Ron Carter, his CTI “hit,” “Concierto,” the honors in Downbeat and Guitar Player magazines.

But despite more than 20 CDs as a leader and appearances on a zillion more, Hall’s name recognition is surprisingly low in Pittsburgh, a Guild survey of its audience found.

If stardom has eluded the 67-year-old Hall, or if he’s never much pursued it, he still leads a busy life as an established, in-demand player. Speaking by phone from the New York apartment he shares with his psychoanalyst wife, he says of his career nowadays, “Well, it seems very good to me. On the other hand, not as busy as Metheny or John Scofield. But I sort of feel that Pat can’t be any other way. Pat Metheny, I think, is a bit driven.”

Hall first met Metheny in the late ‘60s, when Metheny was only 15. “I kid him about it. He was like a juvenile delinquent. Pat had been to a guitar summer camp, and Attila Zoller was teaching there. I was working with Ron Carter in a club here in New York called The Guitar. And Attila came in with this kid. Attila sort of took Pat all around New York, introducing him to different musicians. He just sort of left home for a couple of weeks to see the big city.”

Hall didn’t actually hear Metheny play till years later. But Metheny was already a big fan of Hall, whom he has consistently cited as his favorite guitarist.

The two first played together at the Jim Hall Invitational, as it was billed, part of the JVC Jazz Festival in New York in 1990. Metheny emceed and was one of a dozen or so musicians who took turns performing with the master.

A few years ago, Hall and Metheny played four duo concerts in France. “We hadn’t even had time to rehearse. And it went so well that I think we both stored that away. And we’ve always had the idea of recording together or performing together more.”

They got the chance on Hall’s already completed CD, “By Arrangement,” due out in September. Metheny performs on one track, the John Lewis-penned “Django.”

“That’s the one where I sing on my solo,” Hall says with a laugh, referring to some inadvertent, odd-sounding humming. “It’s funny, I had no idea I made that much noise when I play. Because it was an acoustic guitar, the microphone was up [high].” The engineer eventually took Hall’s solo from an alternate take, where the humming was a little less pronounced, and spliced it onto the version heard on the CD.

“Sometimes I laugh when I hear it, and sometimes I wince,” Hall says. “I sent a copy to John Lewis with an apologetic note. And he called — it sounded like he was kind of grinning himself — but he said he liked it.”

Just a week or two ago, Hall and Metheny spent three days in a New York studio rehearsing and recording for the duo CD. After they perform at the Guild, they’ll pick whatever sounds best from both the live and studio dates.

As for material, they might do a new blues Hall wrote, and a bossa nova or two — possibly “Joao,” which Hall wrote for his recent solo guitar album. The duo has also worked up Metheny’s popular “Farmer’s Trust,” Steve Swallow’s “Falling Grace,” and a new Metheny tune called “Ballad Z.” And, Hall adds, expect a standard or two.

“By Arrangement,” meanwhile, is the latest in a series of five ambitious, slightly off-center CDs Hall has recorded for Telarc. First came “Dedications and Inspirations,” the solo guitar disc with overdubs. “Dialogues” and the live CD “Panorama” both featured Hall’s rhythm section and a parade of guests, including some pretty spikey ones, like guitarist Bill Frisell and saxophonist Greg Osby.

Then there are the two orchestral projects. “Textures” showcased original tunes arranged for brass and strings. “By Arrangement” gives extended treatments to pieces like Bill Evans’”Waltz for Debby,” Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby My Dear” and Benny Golson’s “Whisper Not.”

Hall grew up in a housing project in Cleveland, and he studied music theory and composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music in his 20s. One wonders why he has waited till now to flex his orchestrating and arranging chops.

“For one thing, I figure if I don’t do it now, it’s gonna be too late. This has been on the back burner for me since I was in music school. And then, yeah, Telarc seemed very amenable. Even the first album, with the overdubs, that was pretty adventuresome for a record company.”

Since the jazz marketplace prefers straight-ahead trio or quartet renderings to extended exercises in color and thematic development, one wonders if Hall or the record label was worried about the reception for these big-budget projects.

“I don’t think the music is inaccessible at all,” Hall says, then reconsiders. “Yeah, maybe it is a little difficult, but it’s rewarding for me. I wouldn’t want to play down to people. In fact, when I’m performing even, just with the trio, after many years of doing it, I’ve finally realized that my philosophy is: I like to draw an audience in. Because I do respect the listener, but then I also enjoy taking the listener someplace where maybe the listener hasn’t been before. So I hope that’s kind of what I’m doing on these records.”

To be precise, Hall has tackled the orchestral side of jazz once or twice before, contributing a work to an influential 1961 album called “John Lewis Presents Contemporary Music: Jazz Abstractions — Compositions by Gunther Schuller and Jim Hall.” Back then, they called it third stream music — an attempt at a kind of classical/jazz fusion.

“I think the piece you’re talking about is called ‘Piece For Guitar and Strings,’and that’s not a bad piece. Yeah, I would say this is similar. In a certain sense what I’m doing now is a bit more commercial than that, ‘cause I’ve had all these years of performing in front of audiences, and I guess I’m more aware of not wanting to alienate them.”

Hall is revered by musicians for his ability to listen, to react almost telepathically to what the other players are doing with the moment. He traces that back to music school as well.

“All the years of doing counterpoint, and analysis and ear-training, I think that helped me immensely to listen. And I played string bass in the orchestra in school. So that got me tuned into [ listening to] the bass fiddle.

“And I also discovered that I’m not really a guitar virtuoso. It seems like no matter how much I practice, I’ll never be able to play like Pat Martino. So partly out of survival, I think, I went this other direction of trying to make the groups work out well. I pick players mostly for how they listen and how they react, more than whether or not they’re virtuosos. Often they go hand in hand. But sometimes not.”