It was one of the coldest days of the winter and the guitarist Pat Metheny was only a few minutes late, but he had called ahead. When he arrived at our meeting place, a small recording studio within Right Track Studios on West Forty-eighth Street in New York City, he arranged his things—including some musical scores—on the couch and sat down in a swivel chair before a ninety-six-channel console. Metheny grew up in the rural Midwest but seems Californian; he has the inner glow. He had no socks on and looked comfortable.
“Basically, it’s impossible,” he said flatly, and smiled. “My taste, my general connection to music, I mean, even now, I think it just can’t be done.”
I had proposed that we listen together to a few pieces of music that affected him strongly. It could be any music: not desert-island endorsements or a strict autobiography of influence; the point was to talk about how music works and how he hears it. Metheny took the challenge seriously.
“For me to say I’m going to build a case that describes something, under the guise of three songs, it actually shuts me down a little bit,” he said, seeming pained. “The whole idea of style and genre is actually something I’ve willfully resisted from the very early stage. So if I pick this and then I pick that, it creates these two pillars. But I think I know what you’re looking for, which has nothing to do with what I’m talking about.”
He began to warm up. “I don’t think too much about stuff like this, and it’s been kind of a musical psychoanalysis. Most musicians are occasionally asked to put together their ten favorite albums, but you’re looking for the undercurrents to it all.”
“You’ve got it perfectly,” I said.
He took a CD-R out of its case, onto which he had burned six pieces of music. “Well, then let’s start with Sonny Rollins and Paul Bley.”
Dealing with great jazz improvisers is often dealing with masters of certainty: people who for most of their lives have been trusting their impulses to make things up on the spot. Metheny—fifty years old at the time of our meeting, in 2005—extends that certainty to talking, exhaustively, about music, both in specifics and at a conceptual or historical remove.
He is ecumenical and opinionated, practical and quite idealistic, a cheery defender of his own causes. Although he is a jazz musician at the core and is generally thought of as such, he does not believe his purpose in life is to further the cause of the guitar in jazz, or even of jazz itself.
On the telephone a few days before, I had asked him whether he’d be talking about a lot of guitarists. “The guitar for me is a translation device,” he said by way of an answer. “It’s not a goal. And in some ways jazz isn’t a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination—a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.”
Growing up in Missouri, Metheny developed his certainty as a high-school-age professional in Kansas City. In 1975, when he was twenty-one, he made his first album, Bright Size Life, with a trio including Jaco Pastorius on bass and Bob Moses on drums, and started to bring about a change within jazz—a compositional one, really, that affected all kinds of instrumentalists, not just guitarists. The record introduced a lyrical strain in the music that didn’t come from the blues or old popular standards; he was not aggressively overplaying, as many jazz-into-rock guitarists were at the time, and he suggested new areas of harmony that had not yet flooded American jazz pedagogy, but soon would.
A few years later he formed the Pat Metheny Group and has kept some form of it together since 1977, playing music that is melodically rich, harmonically advanced, besotted with the possibilities of effects and recording technology, and often kind of glossily pretty. That prettiness—and the adaptations he has made to the sound of the guitar, especially the guitar synthesizer, with its limpid, brasslike sound—has been insurmountable for many people who prefer their jazz based in the rudiments of swing and blues, and in acoustic sounds. But his audience has never abated.
Pay attention to his work, and he will eventually get around to whatever it is you like, whether it be Question and Answer, a record of tough, imaginative postbebop and post-Coltrane playing with the bassist Dave Holland and the drummer Roy Haynes; his popfusion melodies with the Pat Metheny Group; his solo acoustic records; or separate collaborations with his heroes Ornette Coleman and Jim Hall and Derek Bailey. It is a weirdly wide aesthetic swath.
The Pat Metheny Group reshaped itself in the last decade, bringing in some of jazz’s best young players, including the trumpeter Cuong Vu, the harmonica player Grégoire Maret, and the drummer Antonio Sanchez, for a 2005 record, The Way Up. In general, Metheny made curious moves in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century: a very strummy solo record for baritone acoustic guitar, some duet records with the pianist Brad Mehldau, some work in a trio with the bassist Christian McBride and Sanchez, again. For young musicians, working with Metheny is no small thing. He has a worldwide audience, and a tour with him means a good financial year. But you often come away with the sense that Metheny gets even a bigger charge out of it than they do. It’s more necessary information, more pleasurable study.
The Way Up is Metheny’s most ambitious work. Ascending melodic passages keep driving through it, and though certain themes return after long stretches, this is not short-form music, like most jazz. It is a sixty-eight-minute-long, through-composed suite, redolent in parts of Steve Reich, and its score has no repeat signs.
If you knew Metheny only from hearing his work played on smooth-jazz stations in the 1980s, records like this would be a surprise. But then you have to remember that over the past decade or so he has been first in line to disparage smooth jazz as anti-intellectual snake oil. (His fulminating criticism of Kenny G.’s posthumous duet with Louis Armstrong in the song “What a Wonderful World,” posted on his Web site, became probably the most widely read piece of jazz criticism in the year 2000.) More to the point, he seems always to be looking to surprise you. What he appreciates in music, beyond a certain requisite level of technique, is very difficult to quantify.
He is broad-minded—and among established jazz musicians, this is a rarer condition than many think. He has the enthusiasm and energy of someone much younger, and surprising amounts of both seem purely focused toward making music. On his site, he answers his devotees’ questions about other musicians in jazz, rock, and classical music with testimonials that he has checked them out, rigorously citing particular concerts or records. “Sure . . . ,” goes a typical Metheny response to a question about a progressive-rock guitarist, “I have been following Buckethead’s thing closely since he came on the scene about 10 years ago now . . .”
Elsewhere a fan asks whether Metheny is a wine or beer drinker—and if so, which regions, microbrews, and so forth, does he favor. A reasonable question for a man of such discernment. Metheny’s answer seemed to reveal something about his stamina, his focus, and his seriousness: “weirdly, i have never tasted wine or beer. no special reason, just never interested in it.”
In 1963, Sonny Rollins made a fascinatingly tense record with his saxophone-playing role model, Coleman Hawkins. Sonny Meets Hawk! had an almost transparently psychological subtext: Rollins wasn’t trying to outsmart his aesthetic idol so much as to be very, very himself, with all possible eccentricities, in the face of Hawkins’s magnificence.
“He was a young guy at the time,” Metheny marveled, listening to Rollins’s emphatic, darting lines in “All the Things You Are,” harmonically at odds with Hawkins’s, on the opening chorus. “That feeling is such a great feeling—like ‘I can play anything, and it’s all good.’ Not to analyze it, but Hawk was kind of like his father. And it’s like Sonny’s saying, ‘yeah, but . . .’ ”
What especially attracts Metheny to the track, though, is Paul Bley’s piano solo. It is made of elegant, flowing phrases that move in and around the tonality and the melody of the song; it builds momentum and becomes carried away with itself. Metheny calls the solo “the shot heard ’round the world,” in terms of its aftereffects in subsequent jazz, especially through Keith Jarrett.
“I think maybe we should just stop there,” he said at the end of Bley’s solo. He had a point to make about this song; he wasn’t going to get distracted with more minutes of it.
It seems to me, I said, that Bley was playing phrases that were very articulate and coherent within themselves. They sometimes clashed with the guiding harmony of the piece. But what he was doing sounded inevitable.
He looked pleased. “You used a word that describes everything that I’ve brought in today, which is inevitability. And the inevitability that I respond to is less on the cultural scale than on the melodic scale. The thing about that solo for me is: there’s a certain kind of elusive and very mysterious groove that connects things melodically and rhythmically, that offers a certain kind of resonance or truth or power that you can’t really quantify.” He backed up. “If you talk about what is a great tune or a great solo, there are all these things you can quantify. There’s a million things we could talk about here, harmonically, that are actually fairly specific. We could go to the piano and break them down. I think that has to do with this area you’re talking about, of clashing. Rhythmically, there’s also some really amazing stuff going on there.
“His relationship to time,” Metheny went on, “is the best sort of pushing and pulling, wrestling with it and at the same time, phrase by phrase, making these interesting connections between bass and drums, making it seem like it’s a little bit on top, and then now it’s a little bit behind.” (He held an index finger straight up, and moved it slightly to the right and left, like a bubble in a carpenter’s level.)
“But there’s also this X factor,” he continued. “It’s the sense of each thing leading very naturally to the next thing. He’s letting each idea go to its own natural conclusion. He’s reconciling that with a form, of course, that we all know very well. And he’s following the harmony, but he’s not. It just feels like, ‘why didn’t anybody else do that before?’ And it’s still being absorbed, I think.”
There is a plainspokenness, a natural folk feeling, to Bley’s lines and his harmony, I added. Is the idea of “inevitability” related to that?
“Well, for me,” he answered, “let’s keep jazz as folk music. Let’s not make jazz classical music. Let’s keep it as street music, as people’s everyday-life music. Let’s see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they’re living in as what they build their lives as musicians around.” In vernacular art, he said, he saw an inevitability.
“It’s a cliché, but it’s such a valuable one: something that is the most personal becomes the most universal.”
Next we heard “Seven Steps to Heaven,” performed live by the Miles Davis Quintet—including Herbie Hancock, George Coleman, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams—in 1964. It is fast and confident, even in its improvised coda; Williams’s drum solo crackles like gunfire, and Davis’s solo is coolly imperious.
“This is the first record I ever got,” Metheny said, as a prologue. “I got this when I was eleven. My older brother Mike, who’s a great trumpet player, had a couple of friends who were starting to get interested in jazz. He brought this record home. I always hear ‘jazz is something you really have to learn about, and you develop a taste for it, and da da da,’ that whole rap. But for me, as an eleven-year-old, within thirty seconds of hearing this record”—he snapped his fingers—“I was down for life.”
We listened to it silently. “They were really rushing,” he commented when it finished. “I know Herbie really well and I knew Tony very well too, and I’ve talked with them about what was actually going down that night. They thought it was one of the worst gigs they’d ever done. But I was listening to Tony here. The same way the Bley thing opened up this universe—well, Tony too. It’s such an incredibly fresh way of thinking of time. It sums up so much of what that period was. The world was about to shift.”
He redirected himself. “But what I was going to talk about is Miles’s solo.”
Metheny is absolutely heroic to contemporary jazz students—as a prodigy, an inveterate learner, a language changer, and a bridge between different styles of music. (By his list of recordings and performances, he links in many directions. Here are some of the musicians who are separated from him by one degree: Roy Haynes, Charlie Haden, Derek Bailey, Jaco Pastorius, Joni Mitchell, Jim Hall, David Bowie, Milton Nascimento, Brad Mehldau, Ornette Coleman, Abbey Lincoln.)
He sees creeping academicism in jazz as a calamitous area. Whenever his conversation turns to jazz pedagogy, or when he finds himself speaking to jazz students in a clinic or a lecture, he becomes very precise.
“This is the kind of tune that, you know, if we go down to the New School now”—referring to the institution in New York City that’s been particularly successful at producing young jazz musicians—“we’re going to find fifty guys who can just eat this tune alive, in the way that the jazz education movement has evolved toward.” (He meant that they could play it precisely and even speedily, to the point of glibness.) “But there is not one second in what Miles plays in his solo that has anything to do with any of that. It’s this completely invented language that happens to line up perfectly with all the things we now have quantified in jazz in terms of its language and grammar. It wasn’t quantified then, as it is now, that if you see this kind of chord, you’re going to play this set of notes.
“We could say the same thing about Coleman Hawkins. You know, they weren’t thinking in those terms. You kind of had to make up your own system.” (What Metheny wasn’t saying is that he made up his own.)
“The thing about Miles, of course, is that he played a lot of the same stuff a lot of the time, while everything around him kept changing,” Metheny noted. “But on the other hand, this is not an easy tune. It’s not like playing on a blues. It moves around a couple of keys, then a bridge, does a weird move that you’ve got to deal with. He deals with it in such an abstract, hip way. It’s melody, and it has this whole thing of glue—the way ideas are connected with other ideas on a phrase-by-phrase basis.”
Davis had to slow down his imagination to a much calmer tempo than the song’s, I suggested, to imply all that swing in each note and phrase.
Metheny took a deep breath. “Yeah. You know, that word swing is almost a political buzzword. To me, in the language I’m using here, that’s the glue I’m talking about. The connection of ideas. To me, the jazz education movement is really interested in quantifying these things, even on a sort of political-cultural spectrum. But to me what’s beautiful about this is that it’s prequantification. The most abstract thing in the world can swing, in terms of this glue quotient. Cecil Taylor, Derek Bailey—to me, this stuff has got unbelievable glue.”
For another reference, I mentioned the Albert Ayler records with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray—those whirling, intuitively coordinated early examples of free jazz. They just inherently work. You can call it abstract music, but the musicians know the language and the dimensions they’re going to fill, and it’s very graceful.
“Absolutely. It’s how things are connected. It doesn’t matter if we’re going to talk about Bach or Miles or Stevie Wonder or the Beatles. What I love is the stuff that makes the music connect,” he said. “But there’s another way that music connects: with who the person is, the time he’s living in, how he’s able to manifest a sound that represents all that. To me, that’s swing, and it doesn’t have anything to do with jazz.” (His midwestern accent renders the word “jee-azz.”)
“Swing is kind of this quality? It exists in human interaction. In the way somebody talks and moves. I find its resonance in architecture, and literature.”
Acting?
“Yeah, acting. And refrigerator repair.”
Metheny’s popularity jumped to a much higher level in 1979 with his record American Garage. For about fifteen years thereafter, he had no roots other than an apartment in Boston that kept the rain off of his answering machine. Now he lives in New York City, in an Upper West Side high-rise, with his French-Moroccan wife, Latifa, and two young sons, Jeff Kaiis and Nicolas Djakeem.
For a few years during that period he spent a lot of time in Brazil and got to know Antonio Carlos Jobim before the great composer died in 1994. (The influence of Brazilian music on Metheny, rather than the reverse, is an often-disputed point.) Metheny wanted to hear “Passarim,” a condensed three-and-a-half-minute piece from Jobim’s last album, whose words protest environmental pollution; it is the title track of a CD released in both English and Portuguese, and we listened to the Portuguese version.
Metheny smiled as the music started. “It’s so much more than a tune,” he began. “This is really like composition. Especially that little bit.” He backed up the disc to where the chorus of female voices, many of them members of Jobim’s family, repeated lines over a descending harmonic motion.
Jobim’s catarrhal voice reentered. “See, you could call this part the bridge, except that it keeps spinning off into this other stuff, kind of like in ‘Desafinado.’ It should end there, after he’s finished, but it doesn’t, and it goes into this whole other thing. Then it keeps modulating into these different keys.” The music suddenly shifted from bossa to waltz time. “This is so advanced. The beauty of the harmony—major triads moving down throughout this whole thing, with different kinds of voices. Plus, all that glue, melodic glue; it never stops, from the first note to the end. Where are we now? We’re almost two minutes into the track, where nothing has repeated yet. I mean, that’s advanced the way Paul Bley is advanced. There’s a connection there.”
It works because Jobim’s ideas are complete within themselves, I suggested. Does he will them to fit together, regardless of traditional ideas of structure?
“Yeah. It’s like when you first wake up in the morning and you don’t really think about what you’re doing, and maybe you write your best stuff. You’re not in the way. When talking about writing, I often use the analogy of archaeology. There are these great tunes all around. Your skill as a musician allows you to pick them out without breaking them.”
After Paul Bley, his supernova—and then issues of rhythm, melody, harmony, and extended composition—Metheny wanted to talk about touch. He put on Bach’s Fugue no. 22 in B-flat Minor, from the pianist Glenn Gould’s 1965 recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, and read along from the score.
“B-flat minor, the saddest of all keys,” Metheny muttered, at the end.
He began talking at the same speed as before—brisk, insistent—but much lower and more quietly. “There’s a billion things to talk about here, but the main reason I picked this was the way he was able to invoke this almost lyrical, vocal, singing quality from an instrument that doesn’t involve breath. And, of course, when you play an instrument, one of the real challenges is to somehow conjure up that sense of breathing. There’s a number of piano players, jazz and classical, who of course are fantastic at that. You could say the same about some drummers and vibes players. We all have the same mandate, in a way: we try to communicate the kinds of phrases that would be believable if somebody were singing them.”
Some people resist jazz guitar playing, Metheny said, because guitar players don’t convey that sense of breath. “Saxophonists have a very wide dynamic range. They’re dealing with a ratio of about that.” He spread his hands to indicate a foot. “With guitar we have a ratio of about this”—he spread his thumb and index finger to indicate about four inches—“in terms of what we can do with our touch.”
Some pianists would play this music with a more smoothed-out phrasing, I said, more legato than Gould. Metheny replied that what he loves about Gould’s phrasing is that he makes music become almost physical, palpitating. Long ago, the vibraphonist Gary Burton had insisted that Metheny listen to more Gould for precisely this reason.
“No two notes there are ever the same volume. He’s constantly doing this”—he poked and prodded the air. “It’s like, it’s so alive. How many shades of dynamics can you play with? With the guitar, you really have to model in your mind this wider thing; you’re trying to create the illusion of a bigger dynamic range.
“The guy who defined that, on guitar,” he said, on a roll now, “was Jim Hall, who opened up five or six degrees of dynamics on both sides by picking softer. He could then make certain things jump out a little bit more. Certainly the three of us who often get grouped together—me, John Scofield, and Bill Frisell—all of us have adopted that general touch on the instrument.” But, he said, Hall remains the standard. “In jazz, I don’t know that we’ve ever had any other nonwind instrument player who has as much detailed, deep control over dynamics, who really has both extremes. Because”—at least when it comes to electric guitar—“you can play really, really loud, but he also has one of the most fantastic pianissimos of all time.”
Two hours into our marathon of listening and talking, Metheny seemed as fresh as when he came in. Preferring to continue without a break, he ate a snack and kept going. Near the end, in the early evening, we got around to his favorite guitar solo of all time: Wes Montgomery’s chorus and a half on “If You Could See Me Now,” from Smokin’ at the Half Note, recorded in 1965 by the Wynton Kelly Trio with Wes Montgomery.
As a young musician, Metheny did everything he could to sound like Montgomery, including playing without a pick and improvising parallel lines an octave apart. “But when I was fourteen or fifteen,” he said, “I realized that what I was doing was really disrespectful, because that wasn’t me, that was him. I grew up in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. I didn’t grow up in New York City. I’m white; I’m not black. I’m from a little town where you couldn’t help but hear country music, and I loved it. I always wanted to address those things with certain notes, qualities of chords, kinds of voice-leading.” He cued up the solo. We listened once, then listened again while he talked.
“This is such an incredibly strong melodic opening,” he said, during the first four bars of the solo, before Montgomery moves into triplet patterns in bars five through eight. “And also, that first phrase is pretty full, like a full speaking voice, but then”—at bars three and four—“he’s really soft here. It’s almost like Glenn Gould; every note’s a different volume.”
In the second chorus, the band starts to swing harder, and Montgomery plays powerful, earthy phrases in the second A section. “Then there’s the blues factor in all of this, too, which he just tucks in there.” Toward the end of each section, Montgomery forecasts the beginning of the next part, building some tension; each time Metheny heard this, he looked ecstatic. “He’s starting a new thing, setting it up. And now, look at this”—during the second chorus—“just quarter notes. He gets two or three levels above the time, and then gets right back in the pocket.”
“It’s really hard to play a short solo,” Metheny said, when the track was finished. “Like an eight-bar solo. Every single thing about it has to count. And that’s like Bach, almost.”
Metheny’s pronouncement in the Times that B-flat minor was “the saddest of all keys” quickly appeared on several blogs about music, as a Deep Thought. Neither the bloggers nor I had realized that Metheny was quoting from This Is Spinal Tap. He was going so fast that the reference went right past me.
In the movie, Marty DiBergi, the documentary filmmaker (played by Rob Reiner), is listening to Nigel Tufnel, Spinal Tap’s guitarist-singer-songwriter (played by Christopher Guest), practice a melancholy piece on the piano. “It’s very pretty,” says DiBergi.
“Yeah, I like it,” Tufnel says. “I’ve been fooling around with it for a few months now. It’s very delicate.”
“It’s a bit of a departure from the kind of thing you normally play.”
“It’s part of a trilogy, really, a musical trilogy that I’m doing in D minor, which I always find is really the saddest of all keys. Really. I don’t know why, but it makes people weep instantly.”
When I e-mailed Metheny about this later, he was glad to learn that I had only been slow on the uptake. He had worried that my printing his quote as spoken, without proper annotation, was an act of mock-serious irony, to counteract his act of mock-serious irony, which would have been building on the original mock-serious irony in the film. “I think that is one too many,” he wrote, “and may well be illegal in some states.” The overarching irony, he pointed out, is that E-flat minor is, in fact, truly the saddest of all keys.
Set List
Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins (with Paul Bley), “All the Things You Are,” from Sonny Meets Hawk! (RCA/BMG), recorded 1963.
Miles Davis, “Seven Steps to Heaven,” from The Complete Concert 1964: My Funny Valentine and Four & More (Sony Legacy), recorded 1964.
J. S. Bach, Fugue no. 22 in B-flat Minor, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Glenn Gould, piano (Sony Classical), recorded 1965.
Antonio Carlos Jobim, “Passarim,” from Passarim (Verve), recorded 1987.
Wynton Kelly Trio with Wes Montgomery, “If You Could See Me Now,” from Smokin’ at the Half Note (Verve), recorded 1965.