Pat Metheny: 10 of the best

From The Guardian Aug 2014

Here, to celebrate the jazz guitarist turning 60, are 10 of his greatest musical moments, from samba-tinged Beatles, to TV-ad favourites, to noise wigouts

1 And I Love Her (live)

Metheny was inspired to pick up a guitar by the Beatles, watching A Hard Day’s Night 15 times as an 11-year-old. By the age of 14 he’d heard Wes Montgomery and consciously rejected rock music for jazz. It’s taken him a few decades to reconnect with his first love, and many of his recent albums feature elegant reworkings of his favourite pop songs. This is a gorgeous, bossa-tinged, reverb-drenched version of Paul McCartney’s ballad, caressed on a nylon-strung acoustic and inspired by Al Di Meola’s version.

2 Bright Size Life

Metheny was a teenage prodigy. A few months into a music course at the University of Miami, the music department realised that he was already a better guitarist than anyone on the staff and gave him a teaching job when he was only 17. In 1973, aged 19, he was a faculty member at the prestigious Berklee School of Music. A year later, he was recruited by the vibraphone virtuoso Gary Burton. His first LP as a leader is a spartan, noisy trio session grounded by Jaco Pastorius’s grinding fretless bass, while drummer Bob Moses flails entertainingly behind them. Metheny’s trademark tone – clean, frictionless and sustained with a touch of digital delay – is already evident.

3 As Falls Wichita

After touring with Joni Mitchell’s heavyweight jazz band and recording a straight-ahead jazz album with Michael Brecker, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden, Metheny defied expectations with an ambient album. As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls is officially a duet album with keyboardist Lyle Mays – with Metheny overdubbing assorted guitars and basses – while Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos adds some crucial textures on assorted African, Indian and Latin American percussion. This lengthy opening track, which takes up the entire first side of the LP, is a spine-tingling palimpsest of ghostly conversations, sepulchral organ chords, zither-like guitars and folksy melodies.

4 Are You Going With Me

It was on 1982’s Offramp that Metheny really developed his facility for writing a killer pop hook. Are You Going With Me has since become something of an anthem, a song with which he’ll often end his shows. Written by Metheny and Mays on a Synclavier, it features a lengthy solo from Metheny on a Roland GR-300 guitar synthesiser, first (from 2’06”) sounding like a harmonica and then (from 3’45”) then like a particularly nimble Stylophone. Metheny also reworked the song 20 years later with the Polish singer Anna Maria Jopek as part of the Upojenie project as a kind of electronic world-music groove.

5 Last Train Home

The Pat Metheny Group’s Geffen debut in 1987 saw them continue the samba-tinged light rock, with songs such as Minuana (six-eight) and Third Wind remaining a fixture of his set list to this day. The highlight of the album was this undeniably infectious piece, set to a chugging drum pattern and featuring Metheny on a treated guitar that resembles a sitar. The melody and chord changes are strong enough to sustain repetition in other contexts – Metheny would revive it for solo acoustic guitar on the 2003 album One Quiet Night – but it’s this relentless version that would end up being used for numerous US TV advertisements, radio theme tunes and as incidental film music.

6 Tell Me Where You’re Going (with Silje)

This 1990 collaboration with Norwegian singer Silje Nergaard was only a minor hit in the UK (hanging around the lower reaches of the chart for much of 1990 before peaking at No 55 in January 1991), but it went to No 1 in Japan, top five in Norway and top 10 in dozens of other territories. It sees Metheny doubling up on 12-string guitar as well as providing a smooth, frictionless obbligatos. It wasn’t his first flirtation with the singles chart: Metheny’s biggest hit was a 1985 collaboration with David Bowie, This Is Not America, the theme to the The Falcon and the Snowman, which reached No 14 on the UK chart.

7 Zero Tolerance for Silence, Part IV of V

Metheny’s first foray into the punk/jazz continuum comes with the enthusiastic endorsement of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore emblazoned on the cover. Zero Tolerance for Silence is split into five parts and sees Metheny overdubbing layer upon layer of guitar, adding a rare distortion to his tone. Part IV is a straightforward boogie that’s played as a chorale: each layer of guitar arrives four bars after the last, until there’s more than a dozen separate guitar parts being played simultaneously. You half expect Captain Beefheart to start grunting halfway through. Metheny continues to dip into noisenik territory – 1996’s collaboration with the Yorkshire avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey, The Sign of Four (Knitting Factory) is an unremittingly intense three-CD set. Sadly, none of it is on YouTube.

8 Giant Steps

As a rejoinder for those who doubt Metheny’s jazz chops, here he is playing a wonderfully spacious, bossa-tinged version of Coltrane’s classic. The definitive version is on his 2000 trio album, alongside bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Bill Stewart. This is a similar version recorded for Swedish TV in 2003, featuring Karl-Martin Almqvist on tenor, Leszek Możdżer on piano, Lars Danielsson on bass and Wolfgang Haffner on drums.

9 The Sound of Water

Metheny has been grappling with curious harp guitars since he was a student, most notably on his 1979 solo album, New Chautauqua. In 1984, the Canadian luthier Linda Manzer designed him a fantastical-looking 42-string guitar harp. It’s called the “Pikasso” because it resembles a Cubist portrait of a guitar, with three overlapping fretboards refracted from a body that looks like a normal acoustic guitar viewed through two pairs of bifocals. This track, a standout from Metheny’s two albums with the pianist Brad Mehldau, sees him sounding he’s playing a Japanese koto, a zither, a harp and a double bass all at once – and that’s even before Mehldau joins in at 5’25” with a jabbering piano counterpoint.

10 Is This America

One of Metheny’s simplest and most beautiful melodies, Is This America is a paean to the victims of Hurricane Katrina originally released on his 2008 album Day Trip. He reprised it on Elvis Costello’s Spectacle in December 2008, as Bill Clinton looked on approvingly. While the original album saw Metheny backed by bassist Christian McBride and drummer Antonio Sanchez, here he was accompanied by the late, great bassist Charlie Haden, with whom he recorded one of his finest albums, 1997’s Beyond the Missouri Sky.