Guitarist Pat Metheny Is Not Defined, And Still Undecided

Metheny: John Coltrane, tenor saxophone. You're either going to go through it, you're going to ignore it, or you're going to go around it. And, you know, there's no other path, right? If you're going to play alto, you got to deal with Charlie Parker. When you say the word guitar and there's 10 people in the room; if you could do that comic book thought bubble thing, every single one of them would have a different picture in their mind. I mean, for one guy, it would be Segovia. For somebody else, it would be Wes Montgomery. For somebody else, it would be, you know, Metallica or whatever. In a lot of ways, that's what's great about guitar. It's not defined. It's still kind of undecided, in a way. And also, it sort of is an umbrella that allows me to go to Linda Manzer in Canada and say, “hey, could you make a guitar that's got 42 strings on it?” and somehow it's still in the guitar family. We may not have “the one” but we’ve got like a hundred. There are people who are dealing with the instrument on like, superhuman levels. You know, Derek Bailey was an amazing musician; really interesting thinker, too. He had a quote that I thought was great, too, which was, when you walk into a club and you see a tenor saxophone and an acoustic bass and a drum set, before anybody even plays you kind of have an idea what it's going to sound like. But if there's a guitar on the stage, you have no idea what's going to happen. It's like it could be almost anything. And as soon as you throw a guitar in there you're opening up a whole world of chaos, because it's so determined by the player what it's going to be. And there is not this sort of agreed upon rule or sound or anything else. My personal relationship with the guitar has evolved a lot over the years. I mean, you know, at the time I made my first records, I'd only been playing for five or six years. It's like 50 now, or more. I can play, like, a lot better now. I mean, really a lot, lot, lot better now. There's no question that your [musical] fluency does allow thought pathways to open up because you have access to them through your fluency. But it's a little bit of a chicken and egg thing, too. The fluency that I've developed has been specifically directed towards the kinds of things that I feel are mandated to become the musician that I hope to be.

Metheny: The issue of genre description has been kind of an ongoing thing for me right from the beginning. Nobody likes the J word [sic]. And, you know, there's this community of musicians where we could play with the New York Philharmonic one night, but we could play with Beyonce the next night and we could play really loud or really soft, or really fast, or in the changes or out of the changes. It's not like I haven't written a lot of notes over the years. A big area of interest for me as the years went on, was the whole idea of sort of reconciling improvising, which was the reason I started writing music, but to reconcile that impulse with written material, which is one of the danger zones in this general zone of that community that I described, it's a hard thing to do to get the balance just right. But going to this record that's out now, the significant difference, really the one major thing that's different about this, is that there is no improvising. Everything about it is written in the score. And as much as I've written a lot of stuff for a lot of incredible musicians, it's always been in the service of setting up an environment for all of us to do our thing as improvisers. In this case, these guys are not improvising musicians.

Metheny: I've been really lucky for the last 20 years to have in my various bands Antonio Sanchez (drums), who is truly one of the most masterful musicians I have ever known. That's a little bit like getting Albert Einstein to be in your math department at your college. And if you're going to have Albert Einstein, great. But you've got to keep him interested. You got to, like, set up in a setting where Albert can be Albert. And, you know, with Antonio, it's like every time I'm writing for a project and Antonio's in the band, I'm like, “wow, I've got this guy that can do all this stuff.” And I also want to make sure that I go to places that I'm not quite sure he's ever been. And to me, they're not mutually exclusive operations, to sort of deal with somebody's strengths while pushing to hopefully new territory — and that may even be a matter of taste. In this case, it was more like, what do they really sound like and what are they really good at? And it's going to be all written. But that's the currency that those [Road to the Sun] guys trade in, is written notes. So, you know, it was kind of an education for me, too, beyond just composing the pieces. But to figure out, like, exactly how to notate them, to get exactly the kind of thing that I had in mind required a little bit of an investigation into the guitar that had not come up for me before.

Metheny: Honestly, when people start talking about genre, I don't know what they're talking about. Part of that may be because of my growing up it was music on records. I had my parents’ Henry Mancini Records, and then I had the Beatles records, and then I got an Ornette record, and my brother brought home a Miles record. They were all sitting there together. There are words that didn't even exist when I started, that I still don't know what they're talking about. Like “fusion,” which is another really dumb word (Metheny won five Grammys for Best Jazz Fusion Performance). And I was like, really? And then there was all the hyphenated stuff. But, I mean, worse than that is in the world of pop music where there are dozens of sub-groups. But in almost every case, you know, somebody is going to play the root on one. There's going to be something banging the crap out of two and four. On the spectrum of all music that could ever be conceived, these 10,000 subgroups of pop music are to me, clearly political, cultural designations way more than they're musical ones. Bennett: I largely agree that sometimes these designations can be kind of arbitrary. But could one argue that there is some value in having that political or cultural designation around music to lift up or speak to a certain group of people? Metheny: What's the value? Bennett: What's the value of doing that? Metheny: Yeah, I'm curious from your perspective. Bennett: So maybe it's the value of community in a shared, let's say, language. Or even a shared dialect within, I guess, maybe certain musical references and callbacks to traditions that might exist within certain cultures, or identities that are not manufactured, but that kind of coalesce in response to something that is going on in greater “society.” You think about criticism and discussion of gangsta rap, right? Sure, I guess you can just say it's hip-hop. But maybe that specific designation of gangsta rap can speak to certain social or political issues that are, you know, extant in the places where that music is coming out of. I generally agree that genre can erect these barriers that aren't necessary to the enjoyment of music. But part of me is also like, well, maybe by calling something what it is, it's creating a community of listeners around a certain idiom. But that's just me. Metheny: Christian McBride, he had a great quote. I think it was about Norman Connors, a drummer, kind of a jazz-ish drummer in the 60s, 70s... he did kind of an almost R&B kind of record, kind of like Roy Ayers or something like that. At the time that was not really considered like something you would read about in Downbeat or something like that. And somehow Christian referenced that and the interviewer said “well, that's not really jazz,” and Christian said, “well, it wasn't then, but it is now.” The word you use that I like the most is community. And I mean, that is, I think, also a moving target, probably day by day even. But it's for real, too. And, you know, to talk about the world of hip hop and that whole thing and where those subgroups fall, you're also right. It's literally a cultural thing. I mean, or we could probably say the same thing about, you know, the music of central Morocco compared to the music from Marrakesh. There is music that is literally based on day to day current events. And at the same time, that music may need 30 or 40 years to be put into the context of this broad sense of what music is.

Metheny: OK, I'm going to start by saying I have such limited input time because I'm on like perpetual output. It's impossible for me to listen to any music casually. And this drives everybody in my family crazy because I can't just sort of put it on. If there's music on, I'm playing with whatever that is or I'm giving it my full attention because to me, that's what music should be. A lot of the musical input that I get is what everybody else is listening to. So let's go to where you or another musician said, hey, have you heard “blah, blah, blah?” And so I would take it pretty seriously and I would get as high quality of a version of it as I could get. I like to listen on headphones. If it's a recording studio generated thing, I kind of like to put myself in the space that the people that were playing it were in. I listen carefully and, you know, if it's something that I know I will probably not get warmed up to, I give it a shot and think about the person that recommended it to me, kind of put myself in their place as best I can to try to imagine what it is that they're listening for that caused them to think this is great. The exposure that I had to music is very spotty. I mean, I'm still filling in stuff that would be really basic for a lot of people, not to mention that there are people I really love that I want to know more about them. And I want to know, like, “OK, this guy played with that guy, and how did that come to be that they could get to that feel? And what was the history behind that?” When I did the score for the Falcon and the Snowman, the director recommended David Bowie and I really was not quite sure who that was. I thought he was Bryan Ferry. That was just a part of music that I wasn't that interested in from the cultural standpoint. Let's say I was just not there. But, you know, he was incredible. I mean, obviously, I know that now, but I didn't know it then. So there's just a constant bit of filling in for me that I would say that is a part of my listening thing.

Metheny: I didn't know that much about him. I am aware of that cultural thing. I know a couple of his pieces. I heard that piece [Für Alina] on the radio, I didn't know it was his piece. I waited till the end to find out what it was, and I wrote down the name of the piece. Because when I heard it, right away, I was like, this is perfect for the 42-string guitar, it just fits exactly in the register. The premise of the piece is that you hold the sustain pedal down the whole time, which is clear when you hear it is in its piano form. The instrument that I had Linda Manzer build for me, this forty two string guitar — literally my description to her was: I would like an instrument where I can have everything ringing and I could play stuff over the ringing. And I have used that guitar a lot of different ways. The one thing I had never done was to tune it entirely as a diatonic instrument. And that's what I did for that piece.