A Conversation with Pat Metheny – HuffPost 6/5/11

Mike Ragogna: Pat, your new album is titled, What’s It All About, a line from the song “Alfie,” one of ten cover songs you recorded for the project. Since this is an unusual approach for Pat Metheny, can you go into what this new album is all about?

Pat Metheny: Well, this whole thing is of baritone guitar, which is the instrument that is featured on this record–for people who don’t know what that is, it’s a kind of guitar that sits between a conventional guitar and a bass guitar. It’s an instrument that doesn’t really get used that much, and kind of for a practical reason. It’s a little bit muddy sounding if you use it in its conventional tuning–down a fifth from a guitar. About ten years ago, I was experimenting with a baritone guitar, and I remembered a way of stringing and tuning it that a guy had shown me when I was a teenager in Missouri where I grew up. I ended up recording, basically, an entire album of improvised pieces that night in that tuning, using that guitar. From that time until now, that’s been a pretty solid part of almost every live presentation that I’ve done–playing something on the baritone guitar. That night, I didn’t exactly understand it, but with ten years now under my belt, doing a lot of playing with it, it’s something that has emerged as a pretty significant voice for me.

One thing that I had just never done until now–because I play so much of my own music, I’m always writing my own stuff, and lately it’s been very complicated stuff–I’ve never done a record of playing other people’s music. I was just at the end of a tour. I did one hundred forty concerts last year and I just started playing some of the songs that I would play to warm up with at sound check, but I did it into a recording device that I have here at home, which we all have now, and you can do pretty quality recordings in a non-studio environment. The result of those recordings is this record. It’s ten songs that are just songs that I love for various reasons.

MR: Now, you won a Grammy in ’01 for your previous solo acoustic album, One Quiet Night, right?

PM: That’s right.

MR: And that was also done with the baritone guitar.

PM: Yes. That’s actually the record I was referring to a second ago. It’s funny because at that point, playing solo guitar was just something that I had not done a lot–not because I don’t like it–because I’ve been so involved in playing in ensemble settings and playing more straight ahead jazz, and the solo stuff didn’t come up that much. That record sort of broke down that wall–not that it was necessarily a barrier–between me and playing solo a lot. I’ve done various other kinds of solo records over the years. I did New Chautauqua in the ’70s, which involved overdubbing, and another one a few years later, Zero Tolerance For Silence, which also had some overdubs. Then, Secret Story started as just a solo record too, and then I kind of expanded out from that. One Quiet Night was the first record where it’s really just me playing guitar, there are no overdubs, and it is what it is. This record follows that same line.

MR: Of the songs on this album, which resonate the most with your life? Obviously they all do, but are there any that are part of your life story, associated with something that happened to you?

PM: Well, you’re right that all of them do in some way or another. One thing about it that I would say is I understand these songs have a very powerful cultural connection in a lot of ways. Every one of them was a top forty song at one point or another, and some of them are songs that we all know in a way that is just sort of ingrained…we grew up with that stuff. For me, it’s notable that there is some kind of musical twist in each one of these, something about the chords or something about the way the form is set up that is attractive to me from a musician’s standpoint. It sort of goes a little bit beyond my personal memory of it. In direct response to your question, there are two songs on there, “Pipeline,” and “Girl From Ipanema,” which are two of the first three things that I ever learned on guitar. So, I’ve really lived with those songs for more than forty years now, and the significance of that is certainly not lost on me. In fact, both of those versions are, in a way, probably two of the most extreme diversions from their original forms of anything on the record.

MR: Plus I loved your use of silence–those spots where you’re just taking a break or a breath. They really added to the beauty and originality of the track.

PM: Well, that’s great, I appreciate that.

MR: Another of my favorite songs from that era is “That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be.” I remember as a kid how haunting it was the first time I heard it on the radio. Now, that’s a Carly Simon song, so do you have a fondness for singer-songwriters?

PM: Well, I really have a fondness for a certain kind of musical craft, and you find it in a lot of different places. It has to do with melody writing. I’ve done a lot of stuff that is very abstract, I’ve done a lot of busy, complex stuff, and I’ve done all kinds of things from the most improvised to the most written. But kind of at the core of all of it is this whole sense of melody being this elusive ingredient that gives things the particular flavor, I think, that people associate with me. That, to me, is also the rarest thing to find. It’s easy to be kind of melodic, but to have a melody that has a sort of inevitability that so many of the great songs have is something that I admire wherever I can find it. It could be in a singer-songwriter, it could be in a Monk tune, it could be in Bach, it could be anywhere. That quality of really deep melodic content is something that I sort of have a deep hunger for.

MR: There are artists like Randy Newman, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell who you’ve spent some time with on the road, and you recorded a few things with, right?

PM: That’s true.

MR: You and Lyle Mays went out on the Shadows And Light tour with Joni.

PM: That’s correct.

MR: Pat, earlier in your career, they were labeling you as “new age,” whatever that is or was. I think it’s because you were so inventive and progressive they really couldn’t box you, they couldn’t genre-fy you as pure “jazz.” What do you think about that in retrospect?

PM: Well, almost all of those things are marketing terms that have absolutely no meaning to me to tell you the truth. (laughs) I’ve been around long enough now that I’ve seen a billion terms come and go. That particular one is one of the goofiest of them all, but there are a million other goofy ones–“fusion” was one that people used for years. Mostly, they’re used by people in a pejorative way, to me. It’s either a marketing thing or a pejorative thing, and it’s mostly a meaningless thing to me because I don’t really think like that at all. There’s never a point where I’m thinking, “If I’m playing a Steve Reich piece, this is classical, and now if I play a major chord, this is folk.” To me, it’s music, and music is sort of one big thing. I really don’t even understand any of that stuff. When people start talking about that, I’m like, “Okay, well, I don’t even know what you mean.” So, all that stuff is a little lost on me.

The best thing you could say about it is that it’s superficial or superfluous to the actual notes, and I sort of live in the world of, hopefully, good notes. The currency that I trade in is ultimately answering to a much longer view of what music actually is, that goes forward and backwards. When I’m talking about good notes, I’m talking about Bach, I’m thinking about any point along the way where people have been able to understand music to a degree that allows them a fluency that I think is transcendent to any style anyway. If I think about Herbie Hancock, yes Bud Powell comes to mind, but so does Ravel–there’s a connection in both ways. There is so much talk about music that doesn’t have too much to do with music, it’s more about the culture in a way. I have to say that for the entire time I’ve been around, I’ve never had even the slightest interest in that. I’m really just trying to play good.

MR: Nice. Okay, you admired Wes Montgomery, Ornette Coleman and The Beatles. How do you get from there, to having your innovative–I don’t mean to throw another term at you, but I believe you’re an innovator. How do you get from those types of influences, to the type of guitar player that you ended up being?

PM: Well, you’re right–Wes was huge for me. When I first started, like most people, he was such an influence for me that I really tried to play like him. The first couple of years, I played with my thumb, and I don’t think anybody could have loved Wes more than I did and still do. There was a point very early on where I realized, if I really looked at it, what I loved about Wes was that he had found his own voice. He had found something that was uniquely his, that was completely built on his own experiences, and his own sensibilities about sound and music. I thought, “Well, if I like this guy that much, then I should go deeper than just the top level of trying to sound like him.” Why not use him and the other people you mentioned as an example of not just what they did, but the whole idea of expression and artistry in music being a deep, honest reflection of who you are and where you come from, which is the thing that really unifies all of the really great musicians that I can think of. That, I think, ultimately almost always manifests itself in some sort of originality.

Jazz is a form that kind of demands that. We have entered an era in the last twenty years or so where the idea of having to come up with your own thing in jazz has been somewhat relaxed because of the conservative movement that happened with really young musicians, which is still a little bit of a mystery to me. To me, jazz is a form that is sort of unforgiving, in a way. People think of jazz in a nostalgic way–lots of times, it gets used in black and white pictures and all that stuff. But the actual form itself is amazingly unreceptive to nostalgia. It’s a form that really needs new thinking all the time, and rewards new thinking. So, I’ve been really committed to that as a way of operating, trying to push things, and trying to ask hard questions of myself and the musicians that I play with, to go deeper into things, rather than just sort of doing tributes to this or that. I don’t think the world really needs reminding how great Miles was, how great Monk was, or how great Duke Ellington was. Those guys more than speak for themselves through their recordings and also through their general legacies. To me, the idea would be to try to, in our own way, reflect back to the world what we see, the same way the people we admired the most did during their time.

MR: Beautiful answer, and you’ve been rewarded for your pushing the boundaries in music with at least eighteen Grammys. It seems like you’re always having to push the boundaries, with all of these collaborations–with The Pat Metheny Group, collaborations, and with your solo recordings. Of all of these kinds of configurations, what environment do you find yourself the most creative in, and what are you happy with the most?

PM: Well, one thing about my particular spot in things. I notice that I’m one of those people that if you ask any five others, they’re going to have a completely different idea of who I am and what I’ve done. I’m sort of hard to place on the spectrum. I also have an awareness that the people who really love the trio stuff I do are not that interested in the group. The people that follow the film score things are maybe not that aware or interested in the robotic stuff that I did recently. There are very few people that see it the way I see it, which is sort of one big thing. Actually, it’s the “one big thing” part of it that I probably am most satisfied with–it’s not any of the individual parts.

My sense of the world is, of course, this one of incredible stratification that we’re all experiencing in the sense that people who are interested in a certain thing can now find a million niche places to go and look at just that, and they don’t necessarily have to look at the whole picture in their lives. I’m sort of more interested in the whole picture and trying to express over the course of the opportunities I get as a musician what that whole picture is. There isn’t any one part that stands out for me. It’s more the integration of all those disparate things into this thing that people can, I think, always identify as being me, whether it’s playing bebop or a Carly Simon tune. That, to me, has been the goal, and that’s what I’m still working on–trying to find a broad sense of how to be a musician in this very complicated world.

MR: Nice. I have to ask you, how do you play the forty-two string Pikasso guitar?

PM: It’s not easy. It’s an instrument that I requested somebody make for me–Linda Manzer, who is a great guitar builder in Canada. Once she cracked the idea, on a technical level, of how you would do something like that, it took me about four or five years of staring at it just to figure out how to even tune it, you know? It’s been an ongoing thing, to try to figure out what to do with that instrument, and “The Sound Of Silence” track on the record is sort of new territory for me–it’s the first time I’ve tried to play sort of a conventional song on it.

MR: You also have that guitar synth. I guess you started out with the Roland GR-300, and now, there is actually a setting on the Roland JV-80 called, “Pat’s GR-300.”

PM: I guess that’s like the ultimate tech compliment there. That is great.

MR: These are guitarists that became popular after you who sometimes they feel like they’re in your zone, people like Daniel Lanois. When you listen to his music, is there a kinship going on at all?

PM: Oh, I love his music. I think he’s great. In terms of the chronology, I think we must be pretty close to the same age. He’s somebody that I’ve kind of observed across the hall, so to speak. We don’t really have too much interaction, although we both have used Brian Blade, the drummer, a lot for various things. No, I’m a big fan of his. He’s great.

MR: Who are some of your other favorite contemporaries?

PM: Well, I’m still pretty excited about the incredible work that has been done by the generation of guys just immediately older than me. I’m talking about Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Gary Burton, and Jack DeJohnette. That group of guys, for me, is an unbelievable crew, and to me, that’s the standard of musicianship that really maintains across the boards in terms of what great really is. A lot of people get called great, but you start talking about Keith or somebody like that, that’s great. It’s like looking at a Bach score or Mahler–that’s really the standard for everything.

MR: And you do get to play with these guys on occasion, don’t you?

PM: Well, I came up in Gary Burton’s band, which is probably the best possible place I could have ever ended up, and the fact that I got to start playing with him when I was about eighteen is probably the luckiest and best thing that ever could have happened to me. I was around him and Steve Swallow at a very formative stage, and I really am so grateful for that.

MR: This is a more personal question than not, but who came up with that incredible title, As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls?

PM: That’s funny–that’s a great transition because that title was a Steve Swallow song that nobody played. It had a very brief life on one record in the ’60s or something like that. When Lyle and I did that record, we had this sort of extended piece that needed a great title, and I thought, “Man, nobody knows Steve’s tune, and that would be the perfect title for this.” So, I called him up and said, “Steve, can we use your title,” and he was like, “Sure, no one is ever going to play that other tune.” He was very gracious about it. That title really sums up a lot about Steve Swallow’s sense of humor. He’s got a million things like that.

MR: Pat, do you have any advice for new artists?

PM: My advice to young musicians is always the same, which is to try to be around people who are a lot better than you are. If you’re in a band and you’re the best guy in the band, you’re in the wrong band.

MR: Nicely put. Thanks Pat, this has been really terrific. I appreciate you sharing your time and stories.

PM: My pleasure.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney