Sunday, November 9, 1997
A Child of the Times
Pat Metheny says his improvisatory sounds document the
world around us
By Peter B. King, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Arts & Entertainment
For fans and critics who want jazz to sound like jazz,
classical to sound like classical, mariachi to sound like
mariachi and so on, Pat Metheny has some advice: Forget it.
“For about 25 years or so now, the whole idea of idioms has
become obsolete,” says the 43-year-old,
still-boyish-looking guitarist and composer whose own music
is pretty much unclassifiable, except to say that it
involves improvisation and, more specifically, something
from the jazz idiom.
“As we’ve entered into this period of time where the world
is literally collapsing in upon itself, it’s not at all
unusual for me to run into kids from Cambodia to Brazil to
Finland who have grown up with our records the same way I
grew up with Brazilian music (bossa nova), and the same way
that I’ve welcomed the input of all of the people and
places and music that I’ve heard into my vocabulary.
“It’s ended up with this incredible blurring of things that
is just an essential component of the fabric of this
culture. It’s very easy to cry the blues about it, to say,
‘Oh I wish it was like it used to be.’ But it’s too late.”
So keep that in mind when you listen to the Pat Metheny
Group’s “Imaginary Day” — the latest of almost 25 CDs in 21
years Metheny has recorded either with his regular band or
in collaboration with other musicians. The Metheny Group
will be playing pieces from the new CD at the A.J. Palumbo
Theatre next Sunday.
“Imaginary Day” sighs and bristles with wild sounds — a
fretless nylon-string guitar played through a distortion
device; the 42-string pikasso guitar, which is not unlike a
harp; and the VG-8, a device that can make a guitar sound
like any instrument, but with a quicker, less sterile
response than a synthesizer’s.
The tunes careen from a bluesy take on an Indonesian
gamelan orchestra to a piece with Iranian and flamenco
shadings, to one that sounds as if the recording engineer
accidentally mixed in some tracks by Nine Inch Nails.
Metheny says all kinds of music is in the air, and he can’t
help but hear it and love it. So why not play it?
“My choice is to be in this time,” Metheny says on the
phone from the office of his New York publicist, sounding
earnest, enthusiastic and almost as prolific with words as
he is with making records. “We have a responsibility to
document the time we’re living in, as musicians and
particularly as improvising musicians, in a way that will
give the people a hundred years from now a glimmer of what
our lives were like - the same way we get when we listen to
a piece of music from the 17th century or when we listen to
a Miles Davis record from the ‘50s.”
That philosophy has guided Metheny almost from the start of
his career, when he performed with musicians visiting
Kansas City while he was growing up in semi-rural Lee’s
Summit, Mo. He studied music at the University of Miami and
was assigned teaching duties there after a year or two. He
then attended Boston’s jazz mecca, the Berklee College of
Music, where he again taught.
Metheny was only 19 when he began touring and recording
with vibraphonist Gary Burton, who’s on the faculty at
Berklee. Metheny’s 1976 debut as a leader, “Bright Size
Life,” featured his early signature sound - a clean but
nontraditional jazz guitar tone and original tunes with
accents from country music to Aaron Copland, pieces that
carried the bracing scent of autumn roads and cornfields
and small-town Americana.
A year later, Metheny made his first recording with
keyboardist Lyle Mays, “Watercolors.” It was the start of a
collaboration that continues to this day. The next CD was
titled “Pat Metheny Group,” the first of a string of moody,
melodic records released under the PMG name. These were
punctuated regularly by Metheny’s adventurous work with
other, more established jazz musicians, like Charlie Haden
and Ornette Coleman.
Bassist Haden and Metheny first collaborated on “80/81” and
issued “Beyond the Missouri Sky” this year. Metheny
championed the avant-garde saxophonist Coleman by recording
his tunes and, finally, joining Coleman on record with
“Song X” in 1986.
Meanwhile, the Pat Metheny Group solidified into its
current core - bassist Steve Rodby, drummer Paul Wertico
and Mays — who will perform with Metheny and additional
band members next Sunday. The band mined a deepening
fascination with music from Brazil and other parts of the
world. The music grew more densely orchestrated, darker and
more mysterious — especially on a Metheny solo album with a
cast of thousands, 1992’s “Secret Story.” Then Metheny made
a U-turn with 1994’s “Zero Tolerance for Silence,” an album
of noisy, dissonant, metallic improvisations.
Oddly enough, even the most radical of Metheny’s departures
sell in unusual numbers for improvised music — hundreds of
thousands of copies per release. Perhaps the evocative song
titles help to get the music’s message across - tacking the
three words “If I Could” onto a hushed, yearning piece from
“The First Circle,” for instance; titling “Secret Story’s”
mournful finale “Tell Her You Saw Me.”
Then there’s the atmospheric, concept-oriented album art -
often collages of diverse landscapes, planes, pickup trucks
and photos of childhood homes and the band members playing
musical instruments as kids.
If that’s the icing, then the subtle and complex flavors of
the music itself seem to let more people in than mainstream
jazz does — almost as if they were listening to a good
singer-songwriter whose lyrics told a relatively
straightforward tale.
“I get a lot of reactions from people who hear it just like
that,” Metheny allows. “Other times it’s guitar players
that have transcribed every note, and they want to know
about playing over the bar lines and that kind of stuff.
Other people want to know about the different ways we’ve
used all of these new instruments that have evolved over
the last 15 or 20 years.
“I’ve always considered that to be a good sign. Because
I’ve always felt that the best music has the capacity to be
viewed under an electron microscope in incredible detail,
or you can just sort of put it on and it changes the color
of wallpaper in your room. It can be a bunch of different
things for different people.”
For example, Metheny says, take Miles Davis in his “Kind of
Blue” era. Millions have connected with that record as
“just some kind of romantic, moody music. To me, I’m
checking out every voicing Bill Evans played on that
record. It’s very durable. And to me, that’s a very good
quality to try for.”
As big as Metheny’s audience is, he believes millions more
could dig his music if they could only hear it - on radio
or TV or all the other places it’s not usually given a
shake. Suggesting that serious art can galvanize the masses
- the kids raised on “Brady Bunch” reruns and the Spice
Girls - is an idea many observers would dismiss.
“I don’t share that pessimism at all,” Metheny responds.
“The evidence that I’ve seen nightly, from the vantage
point of being on a bandstand, is that people are way
hipper than they are often given credit for.
“And that’s the way I work. I always assume that everybody
knows everything. Sometimes it’s disappointing to find out
they don’t, but it’s a much better way for me to operate -
to think that everybody’s seeing what we’re doing in the
larger context of things. And, if they don’t, then maybe
they will sometime.’’
Copyright © 1997, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
