About five records into his career as leader, Metheny first explicitly honored his heartland roots with the quiet, largely acoustic tumbleweed folk of New Chautauqua. It has been a component of his sound ever since – usually signified by the nylon string guitar. Why fellow heartlanders like Charlie Haden and Bill Frisell have been fêted for the same folk-melody impulse and Pat has not is beyond me, but it probably has to do with a) a certain melodic treacle that Pat just can’t shake and b) jazz face. Strike Two.
Jazz is serious music, but it has a complicated and sometimes testy relationship with serious compositional ambition. It is remarkable how many of the geniuses of jazz never toyed with expanded forms and through-composed music, preferring to live entire careers within the confines of the traditional jazz song forms. Metheny is not among them. Early in his career, as early as 1980’s As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls, Metheny expressed a desire to compose. Never mind that he was up to it, and that he has written some really intriguing stuff over the years: The Way Up, Orchestrion and more. In jazz as in rock, the powdered wig = Strike Three.
Strike Four: bossa nova, in which radical harmonic and rhythmic complexity hides under the most obsequious and comforting covers. Strike Five: jazz face. Strike Six: the guitar synth, of which Metheny was an early pioneer. “Metheny paid $100,000 to make his guitar sound like a bad harmonica,” said my brother’s blues-guitarist buddy Catfish.
Strike Seven: astonishing technical fluency. Compared to his buddy Scofield, Metheny’s needle never seems to go past about 60 percent of his technical capacity. The most difficult passages hardly seem to tax him at all. Sco, on the other hand, lives in the red, at the limits of his technique, calling on everything he’s got to squeeze his impassioned ideas out, which lends a kind of tortured Neil Young fire to his playing. Strike Eight: jazz face.
But hipsters be damned, it’s a career of range, originality and genius. The Unity Band – with frequent collaborator Antonio Sanchez on drums, Ben Williams on bass and the otherworldly phenom Chris Potter on sax – is a limber, unpretentious affirmation that Pat hasn’t lost a thing. And as someone who has seen Pat play live a dozen times or so, I can assure you that he can’t help it with the face. It’s real, yo.
The Pat Metheny Unity Band closes this summer’s Belleayre Music Festival on Saturday, August 11 at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $25 for Lawn seating to $99 for “Super Premium” with numerous stops in between. Belleayre is located at 181 Galli Curci Road in Highmount. For tickets, visit www.belleayremusic.org/music-festival-concert.php?id=135.
An unusual and humorous look at Pat’s career. I’ve been a fan since the white album and have seen Pat (and Lyle!) more than a dozen times and have every CD. The only thing I would take exception with is dismissing recordings like Still Life Talking as “bossa Nova”. Listen to them again. They are unique compositions, played by incredible musicians. I never tire of hearing these songs. They stand up year after year after year.
OK, a “rock person” trying to explain Metheny to a hipster. This article reads like Beavis trying to explain Steven Hawking to Butthead. Metheny is and has been one of the greatest artists of the past 40 years and needs no explanation to anyone with ears.