PSYCHOANALYSIS OF AN IDEALIST
"The idea comes before the instrument, because it's not the instrument I'm playing, it's the idea."
(Pat Metheny, "The Niles Interviews", 2007)
Smooth elevators
I was waiting to start the taxiing on a Brussels-Milan flight and voilà the system dishes up River Quay from the first Pat Metheny Group album. Wondering about it, I found that it unwittingly gave reason to all those people (generally non-musicians) who call those PMG's edgeless sounds "elevator music". As if the attribute "edgeless" suddenly steered sound waves towards the mediocre.
In this article I want to advocate a different line of thought. In Pat's case, in elevators as in plastic hotel lobbies, his sounds have no edges. But they have an Idea that drives them and that for six decades has put PM on another level than - for instance - the one of that musician in the Guinness Book of Records "for the longest note played on a saxophone": Kenny G.
Who somehow has something to do with PM: he is THE ONLY musician that PM has ever dared to insult but in a big way ["he has a gift for connecting with the audience's lowest impulses" (...) "vomiting out lame, sneaky, pseudo-blues, out of tune, strummed, wimpy notes".... "I encourage everyone to boycott Kenny G's records, concerts and anything associated with him" ... "If I ever see him in person, somewhere, I'll let him hear mine and maybe even a guitar wrapped around his neck".]
PM doesn't need me to defend himself from those who call his music smooth jazz or pop. Nor from those who say he is a musician for musicians: not an insult, in fact he's one of the few to deserve this epithet having sold dozens of millions of records.
Nor from those who say he can't stop playing, once he starts: how can you stop inspiration and desire? Or from those who say he is a perfectionist, when in truth he leaves ample voice to his detractors, without letting critics and public to influence his playing: following only that little voice that speaks to him from the soul, while he plays, telling him what to do and what not to do. (I quote, do not invent.)
The music of PM and his PMGroup may not please certain jazz musicians or jazzophiles or some public. But it remains music. In the sense that Charlie Parker meant it: "just looking for the pretty notes".
This is not Novara
At twelve, Pat received a Gibson ES140 3/4 as a gift from his parents. He had already seen The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night a dozen times and the guitar was the perfect instrument to rebel against his parents.
His parents had music in their veins, but on the side of wind instruments. Anyway they promised him the coveted guitar - but he had to do well at school. And even if he didn't give a damn about school (let alone going possibly well at it) he did care a lot about the guitar. Those were the years when testosterone started to beat in the head and anything coming from mom & pop was annoying not only in itself, but especially for the source. It was thanks to the Gibson that he did well at school - but he did even better in the after-school music program.
Shortly after the guitar, his brother Mike (now a respected trumpeter and active in the Metheny Music Foundation - which awards scholarships to promising young people) brought home "Four and More, Miles Davis Live" and from there no Christ held him back: "It was the beginning of the end, or the beginning of the beginning... after the needle had touched that vinyl for five seconds, my life changed forever."
If the guitar allowed him to rebel against his parents, jazz allowed him to rebel against his friends and schoolmates in that small town that was (and still is) Lee's Summit, MO. [A place with huge corn fields, a bit like the Italian Novara/Vercelli regione.]
From then on Pat understood that the only thing that mattered to him in life, before all the others, was that tangle of tangled threads called music. That takes a lifetime and a half to unravel. And to start unraveling it he decided that jazz was the best way to do it - and so he began to do it seriously.
All work and all play
The thing I recognize most about PM is the almost mystical dedication he has put into his life as musician.
After "the baseball bat hit on his head" by "Four, Miles Davis Live," Pat started listening to Wes Montgomery's records and legend has it that Pat would listen to one, memorize it and stack it on the right. And then move on to another from the left stack, until the stack of memorized records was high and the one to be memorized was no longer there.
That's how a fifteen-year-old kid started playing with the best jazz musicians in Kansas City and people started going to listen to "the kid who plays like Wes" and even parents started seeing money coming in - deciding that maybe it wasn't all fluff and that... yes. But Pat: no. He had left for big time music.
We can call this music jazz, but maybe it was like the stuff Pocahontas felt for Captain John Smith: an indelible, eternal love for the most untouchable art there is. So, when he was still a teenager, if he found himself in a jam playing a standard he didn't know, or in a key he wasn't comfortable with, Pat would go home and practice at night: because he didn't want to find himself in that situation again, the next day. There was school - but he spent sleepless nights.
When he reached success, his commitment didn't change. In '80 a journalist asked him: "Do you ever rest?" and he said "No, never, really". In an interview in '85 he was driving on the highway and confessed to the interviewer that that was his habitat: "we traveled 100,000 miles last year in our van" he said and "when I'm between tours, I can't wait to get back to playing so I can rest a bit". And he recalls how he hasn't taken a vacation since he was eighteen "and now I'm thirty" he notes. In 2004 he takes the opportunity of another interview to draw provisional accounts: 7500 concerts. On average 30 years x 250 gigs per year.
Faced with this type of passion, it is not surprising that Pat is literally a self-made man. It is perhaps also the usual matter of seeking success and money. But it goes much further than only that. Because PM had reached both of those beasts early. Yet he still decided to "keep going", to shift to drive for something like... For 45 years in a row!
And we are still counting, because - at 60 years old this year - for now Pat is on tour with 37 concerts in two months, scattered across 6 countries between Asia and North America.
The key moment in PM's music must be found in some moments of his youth in Lee's Summit. It had to be there that - one day - Pat decided that his life's idea was to find his own voice through music.
He will say that he was intent on playing exactly like Wes Montgomery when a more experienced musician scolded him. He said: "why do you do it?" Pat, that night, I think discovered that he really didn't know how to answer to that question. And he began to build his own voice: to explain who he is in music with his instrument.
For this reason he will say that the people he respects are plumbers, electricians, musicians - but in any case people who, through what they do with their hands and mind, make it clear who they are and "where they come from, who they hope to be, who they have been - in their actions and in the way they carry themselves in life."
It was in that seminal moment that the "Pat Metheny sound" was born.
Perhaps a sound with the treble of the guitar pickup turned down. Maybe that ES175 full hollow-body guitar sound. Maybe even that sound with a reverb of 10 and many milliseconds to the right and twenty and many milliseconds to the left and a 400ms echo halo in the background. And also not plucking all the notes but playing them with hammer-ons and pull-offs and embellishments. And those phrases, chromatics or arpeggios turned into licks, that someone put together and teaches, calling them "metheny-smi". In short, a unique touch, that after three notes you already know it's him playing.
We're talking about these technical things, yes, but also about other things.
Certainly about how Pat appreciated the accessibility of Miles' records and at the same time their complexity: a seemingly irreconcilable mix between what he would later call "invitational quality" (seductive quality?) and incredibly advanced music.
In short, the decision made that famous day and then carried forward in the formative years of Lee's Summit must have been precisely in this area: to find the least common multiple by navigating through complex chords.
He found the clue by sharpening his ear in countless jams and then "studying" with teachers like Gary Sivils or John Elliott with techniques based more on intuition than on today's technical canons. Which he would have learned only when he was already in Gary Burton's band. To be able to become, a few months later, a music professor at the Berklee College Of Music, in Boston.
Jim Hall defined this aspect as it was in his style, synthetically: "Pat can play lines through any kind of chord changes" and, in fact, no matter the harmony, most of Pat's melodies can be sung. But I'll explain the concept with different words.
Take a rough block of marble and study its veins, then chisel it so that those veins are exploited to give space to sinuous, caressing shapes... so that that marble breathes its shapes. And these shapes - so chiselled - live forever and for the moment your sight will award its attention. Metheny asks himself the question any improviser should ask himself, while improvising over a standard: is my melody improving the original one? By improvising over that melody, do I add to or take away from its beauty?
We could perhaps stretch Pat's "Idea" even further. As something you feel when you encounter people who love what they do. Like a carpenter, a plumber, a fisherman. Pat doesn't talk to you about the Idea: he plays it for you. And if you listen and feel that love, you really don't need words, because music, like love - after all - can never be explained well. Music explains itself.
Pat creates notes in a soundscape where, under the melody, there boils a soup of murky mathematical secrets, over which he spreads a veil of immediate grace. I hear it in the duo with Brad Mehldau, where Brad searches for tensions even when there aren't any, and Pat smooths sharp corners out, even where they could feel at home. Listen to Make peace or another random piece from their duo: just as Brad doesn't hesitate to accentuate crooked scales, diminutions and whole tones, Pat is there to hold out her hand to (aurally) "make peace" and consonances.
If there's one thing that's surprising, it's the speed of Pat's "educational path" from pupil to teacher and international master.
If you exclude his first album (recorded a week before the second, with Paul Bley who evidently pushed young Pat into a direction totally different from Pat's own), the Idea is already clear before he's twenty. It couldn't have been otherwise. The official story goes that at the end of high school Pat gave a concert attended by a dean so that - sooner done than said - Pat finds himself with a scholarship to go to the University of Miami.
He moves to Miami, but after 3 days he figures out University life isn't cut for him. But on the 4th day meets Jaco Pastorius. At first he asks himself "does really everyone play like this, outside of Missouri?" and considers going back home. Then he decides that in reality it's the greatest fortune of his life: Jaco is his doppelgaenger: all work and all play. So they start playing together. It's here in Miami that a Mission is added to the Idea, shared with Jaco: "to expand the role of his instrument in the world of music."
We could define these years as some of his most interesting, certainly arousing discontent.
On YouTube you can find a rare concert from '74 in Finland with Gary Burton (and Pat's furious 12-string solo) and the ultra rare (now censored) concert at the Zircon (see at the bottom of the article) where he plays things that would never be heard again.
The Zircon Concert is relevant not so much for its quality: what's remarkable is that the Idea and the Mission, are both already evident.
Pat completes the Idea when he's just 21:
Uniquity Road - from his first solo album for ECM - practically changes key every half measure or so, and yet you can sing most sections of his improvisation. A rare quality in jazz guitarists. There are other guys you can sing: Wes and Jim Hall, precisely, George Benson; but they're all different from Pat; his only - pop - equivalent was George Harrison, with the Beatles.
Two years later from "Bright Life Size" the seminal "Pat Metheny Group" will feature pieces like
San Lorenzo,
April Joy and
Phase Dance (his
Stairway to Heaven) amongst the finest 70's jazz-rock tunes ever. Add to that stuff like
Third Wind or
First Circle and you have 95% of a certain Pat Metheny. Maybe even "music-for-eternal-elevators", if we take for granted that an improvised melodic line must necessarily soar in the air gracefully, over a substratum of instrumental technique out of the ordinary. Then you have the jazz atonal improviser, the solo player, the minimalist perfomer, the pop anthem writer, etc. etc.
(...)
Published in Blow Up Magazine, in Italian.