The annual London Jazz Festival erupts this month — a parade of 300-plus shows that swing from New Orleans funk to Nordic chill-out, jazz-reggae mash-ups to bebop blow-outs. But when it comes to commercial and critical success, one visitor stands out by some margin: the guitarist Pat Metheny.
Now 70, he has played with musicians as diverse as Joni Mitchell, Steve Reich, David Bowie and Ornette Coleman. In the 1990s the Pat Metheny Group won a mainstream audience filling rock-show arenas — a feat few bona fide jazz artists, Miles Davis aside, have achieved. His 53 albums, several selling more than a million, have won him 20 Grammy awards. But as well as the breezy, hook-laden tunes he conjured with the keyboardist Lyle Mays, there have been forays into modern classical, Latin, metallic thrash and the hairier edges of the avant-garde.
In short, the former teen prodigy from Lee’s Summit, Missouri, has always travelled his own path, untouched by musical fashion. “I would say my relationship to the culture is zero. I have never thought of doing anything except what I’m thinking of doing,” he says, smiling. “All I’ve ever done is piss people off [in the music business] because I’m only going to do what I’m going to do. I don’t know what the word ‘commercial’ means. I guess I’m commercial because I’ve sold a lot of records — but, I mean, the tracks are 20 minutes long.”
Right now, what Metheny wants to do is travel solo on a tour that reaches the UK on November 14. I meet him after gig 139 in Utrecht, the Netherlands (London will be gigs 176 and 177). The lone guitarist inhabits a crowded stage, surrounded by multiple exotic guitars (it’s good to see his 42-string Pikasso again), multiple effects pedals, and for the finale, a battery of robot percussion from his Orchestrion project (“a method of developing ensemble-oriented music using acoustic and acousto-electric musical instruments that are mechanically controlled”, as his website explains). It’s a virtuoso two and a half hours that revisits solo work from across his career, with tunes played on the nylon-strung baritone guitar from his new album, MoonDial, a particular highlight.
For such an inveterate road dog — Metheny’s tour manager remarks that he would play every night if he could — the guitarist looks remarkably hale. The trademark shaggy mane is a little greyer but appears just as voluminous as when he guested with Santana at Live Aid in 1985. He’s rocking a T-shirt and season-defying shorts, and could pass for a decade or more younger.
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Metheny has spent much of each year on the road since he was 19. He describes performing as “research”, and while entertaining an audience is not exactly irrelevant, the acclamation of strangers does not appear to be a top priority. “The audience I have almost nothing to do with — I don’t mean that in a snotty way. That’s something I have no control over. Maybe they’re going to like it, I hope they do … I’m grateful that people come because I can continue the research.”
The master improviser talks about his search for “the thing”, which seems to be his term for a higher consciousness achieved through performance. And here, Metheny — chatty, immensely articulate — slips into the gnomic. Talking about the concert experience, take this for example: “The thing for me is the thing. I’ve never been interested in the things around the thing. Even the thing I realise is not a thing. It’s more a symptom of another thing.” He later acknowledges that mere language may not be up to describing these realms.
Back to earth: after each gig Metheny will write up to ten pages of notes on the concert. They may concern whether he should have “played a natural or a flat nine on the sub-dominant for the fourth chord”, or it could be about the venue’s acoustics. “I’ve played this hall 17 times. It’s a difficult gig: among the cats it’s nicknamed ‘the jazz thunderdome’. The sound was pretty much in place tonight but I’ve played with a full band and it’s sounded like Megadeth.”
Other habits include eating next to nothing on a show day until after the gig. “If I’m a little hungry I’m thinking more clearly for sure.” Then there’s the sleeping: when we wrap up at midnight, Metheny is Belgium-bound on the tour coach. His real kip will be at the hotel from 7am to 3pm. He will also fit in two hours-plus of undisturbed practice before showtime.
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“In many ways my metabolism is geared to this — much more than my civilian life. Civilian life is much more difficult. People say, ‘Wow, how can you do a hundred or whatever gigs?’ I mean I’ve got three kids [a girl and two boys aged 15 to 25; Metheny’s home is New York with his wife, Latifa]. There’s a level of predictability about what I do — and it’s also such a privilege. There are so many excellent musicians who don’t get to play so much.”
Part of the problem for the unjustly overlooked is that the public is not very hip to new talent, he says. His own debut as lead instrumentalist, Bright Size Life from 1976, with his friend Jaco Pastorius, then unknown, on bass, sold 800 copies on release, including one in Australia (“Maybe I should have written to him.”). In 2020 the album was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in America’s National Recording Registry.
Metheny has often worked with the drummer Roy Haynes, who used to play with the saxophonist Charlie Parker as he was forging the syntax of postwar jazz on 52nd Street, New York. “I said, ‘That must have been great, the golden era.’ He says, ‘Oh it sucked. It was just a bunch of rich white people talking. You couldn’t even f***ing hear us.’”
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Metheny warms to his theme. “I think about Bach. Like, this guy’s producing the greatest stuff ever for church services every Sunday. How many people came back afterwards and said, ‘JS, that shit was killin’?’ Two, maybe three, and it’s the greatest music anybody has ever written.” He smiles. “Compared to Bach, we all suck.”
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Metheny, though, has worked with artists whom the public took to swiftly. In 1985 he scored a No 14 hit single in the UK, This Is Not America, with Bowie on vocals. “It was a pretty amazing experience to be around one of the most brilliant human beings that’s ever been born. He was incredible … just the level of intense thoughtfulness and brain connection.”
Before that there was a stint in a jazz supergroup assembled by Mitchell for her Shadows and Light tour. This was a less happy experience. “It was trouble for me. You know I’ve never had a drink, never had any interest. That band, which included several of my closest, closest friends, was a mess. Part of my reason for being there was to help everyone not to be such a mess. I’m really happy that after that tour I got Michael [Brecker, the saxophonist] into rehab. Jaco [Pastorius] I never did.” Pastorius, a bass-playing legend, died aged 35 after battling addictions and mental health issues. Metheny points the finger at the late Joe Zawinul, leader of Weather Report, the jazz-fusion group that made Pastorius a star. “Joe Zawinul was a great musician; he was a f***ing asshole … it was a macho thing. ‘Oh c’mon, man, you got to try this.’ I’ve spent my life around addicts, so I know this world very well.”
With no plans to slow up, Metheny wonders whether he is among the last of music’s “old guys”. “Well there’s still Herbie [Hancock], Stevie Wonder … I hope they’re going to be around for a long time. But Sonny [Rollins] doesn’t play, Gary Burton’s retired, Keith [Jarrett] doesn’t play.”
Metheny thinks he’s still on a roll. “It’s not that different for me now than at the very beginning. The main difference is that it’s a lot more fun, because I play a lot better and I can really count on getting to the shit. I am 100 per cent — no 1,000 per cent — confident. It’s definitely going to be better some nights than others. But I can always get to the thing.”
MoonDial is out now. Pat Metheny tours the UK from November 14 to 17, patmetheny.com. The EFG London Jazz Festival runs from November 15 to 24, efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk
