PAT METHENY – WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT

The guitar player from USA was awarded in the category Instrumentalist of the Year International – Special Instruments – an attribute which applies as well to his Picasso guitar, as to his Orchestrion. audiophil wanted to learn more about the musician’s relationship to his instrument with which he plays a significant role in jazz and jazz-rock world:

Ann Kathrin Bronner: Pat, how would you describe your relationship with your guitar?

Pat Metheny: Well, it’s like a thing form me. I know some people have an almost personal relationship. To me, my relationship to it is very similar to what I would imagine somebody who builds houses has a connection to their screw driver. It’s a thing, a tool. You know, I don’t have a strong emotional attachment to it in particular, or any one guitar. To me, they’re tools. You know, it’s funny because the guitar does have a sort of cult around it. There are people who are obsessed with guitars and guitar players. I’m not that! To me, it’s just a tool. It’s a way of expression.

AKB: That’s interesting. You are the first musician I met with this relationship. For Oscar Peterson, for example, the piano was like a sort of second wife.

PM: I have heard that. Lots of people talk like that. It’s not that way for me. Actually I don’t even think about the guitar. I think about the ideas. The ideas are all I really care about. And then the guitar is a tool for manifesting those ideas into sound that somebody else can hear what the idea is. It is nothing more than that, and nothing less. But that’s a pretty big deal: It’s a translation device.

AKB: So it’s another sort of voice for you? Because you are not a singer…

PM: It IS the voice. It’s not a sort of a voice, for me that is the voice.

AKB: And even with the special Picasso guitar, you don’t have any special relationship?

PM: Again, if I gonna use this analogy of tools: That is an instrument that is a tool that allows you to create a sound that you would not be able to get to unless you have the right tool for it.

AKB: So, it’s the golden screwdriver?

PM: Well, I wouldn’t say that because it’s only good for one particular thing. That tool is not a universal tool at all. It’s actually a tool like if you have to turn this particular screw this particular way, that’s the tool for.

AKB: Could anybody learn to play?

PM: Yes! Honestly, it is more of a conceptual thing than it is a playing thing. Like much of my stuff. I mean, a lot of what I play is very easy to play. I’m not doing anything really hard.

AKB: In which regards? In technical regards?

PM: Technically. I mean I see guitar players and they are doing all kinds of really difficult stuff. Most of what I do is just like I said is just ideas. And hopefully it’s the ideas that carry the way. It’s storytelling for me. It’s that! It’s narrative, descriptive, moving through time.

AKB: But you don’t use any lyrics, right?

PM: No.

AKB: Do you have in mind some lyrics when you are playing?

PM: No! To me, one of the beauties of instrumental music – whether it’s classical music, jazz or whatever – is that the abstraction it provides is one that is very unique in the artistic world. Because it has its own syntax, it has its own values, almost as a language in a linguistic sense. So, there’s really no need to I would say go to the lower level of what language is. You’re kind of functioning on a poetic level off-time. And I think that’s part of what makes music unique!

AKB: So if you have a song of 14, 15 minutes of length – which is not so unusual in your music.

PM: Right…

AKB: How do you keep the breathe or the structure over such a long distance? And even if you are playing with others, which makes it more difficult.

PM: I would say that that’s for me kind of the normal amount of time it takes to do something (laughs). The whole idea of “Okay, we gotta make it three minutes!”, that’s a pretty recent phenomenon, you know. And to me, there’s not much in life that really fits into three minute junks. It’s more 14, 15, or 18 minutes. We live in a world where we’re so compelled to examine our particular attitude towards culture. I’m not that interested in that. I am more interested in not just now, but everything over the last 100,000 years up to the next 100,000 years, you know. To me, there is a value in just good notes and good playing. That transcends any issue of time!

AKB: Your actual album is a solo album; but when you are playing in groups, with your quartet or other formations: Is it a democratic thing, or is it more like you are the leader and the others have to follow your ideas?

PM: It’s much more the second than the first. It’s funny, because the whole idea of democratic whatever is a theory in jazz that gets a lot of talk, but I’ve never seen a democratic situation in jazz that is really very effective. To me, there needs to be a strong leader. And everybody who has ever worked with me knows that that would be me (laughter). For better or for worse, everything about the way the music comes out under my name with my group, I take responsibility for. I hire everybody that is in the band, I decide what we’re gonna play, how we’re gonna play it, and talk constantly to everybody about what my ideal is of the music. And it has been that way right from the beginning for me, because I benefited from being around really strong leaders myself. I think there’s a way to be a strong leader, and your job is to bring out the best in the people around you. So, if I have somebody around me, who is very good in doing this, I want them to do that. But also if I see they are not so good in doing that, I also need to take responsibility and say: “Okay, we are not going to do much of that, we are gonna do of what you are good at.” And I think that that’s the way that I work. I describe it a “benevolent dictatorship”: I am the dictator, but within that world there is lots of room for everybody to do their thing. But when I see situations like a co-leader situation or a collective group, it might be fine for a day or two, a week or two, but it doesn’t work over year after year after year. Year after year, that has to be somebody who’s got a picture in their mind and the collective movement is towards that picture. And, like I said, I have never seen any example in jazz of any system other than that system. It’s one thing to do something three or four times, but I play 160, 170 concerts a year.

AKB: But when you are playing so many concerts with the same programme: How similar are the concerts, and how much freedom is still there for improvisation?

PM: Well, that’s a very good question, and within the mythological view of jazz it’s that: Wow, every night you’re improvisers and you make it up completely from scratch every night. I mean, again: Now having done it for 40 years and seen the really greatest musicians of our time, if you see somebody once or twice or three or four times, you may even be able to keep this mythology in place. But if you go see somebody, the greatest: John Coltrane, or Miles Davis, or whoever, if you see all them 10, 12 nights in a row, you would get a sense of just exactly that vocabulary is. And to me it’s not so much a matter of width, it’s a matter of depth. It’s how deep can you go into whatever it is that you present night after night after night. And that’s what I have noticed from many years of being around great musicians is: the really good guys have a sort of almost infinity of depth. And maybe they’re gonna play something they’ve played before… Not maybe, they probably will. But for the person who’s hearing it for the first time, that doesn’t matter. And by the same token, what you played last night doesn’t matter here. It’s like what’s happening right now. So, it’s an interesting mix of that.

AKB: But people have a certain expectation: We have so many records at home. We know your sound, we know your style, so we are expecting the interpretation we do have on the CD.

PM: Well, and I understand that in the case of some pieces that is further away than other pieces. But, you know, one of the oddities of making recordings of improvised music is that there’s a basic disconnect there, which is: Even when you are in the recording studio, the idea is to make it spontaneous and fresh. But you know in your mind that people are gonna do what you said: They’re gonna listen to it over and over again. So jazz recording is almost an art in itself. And also, then it becomes a little bit of a political question: What is the function of the recording? My particular take on that is that there’s two rounds that I fall into: There’s the straight documentary recordings of which the current one is a good example. Just like a snapshot. And then there is a more elaborate kind of recordings that are truly about the production of the recording. I feel completely comfortable at doing records both of those ways and all over the shades in between.

AKB: Did you choose the songs fort he new album under the premise good for recording? Or is there rather a special meaning for you in each of the songs?

PM: Every song on there besides the way that it sort of fits into my personal chronology, there is something about every song that is just unique musically, like some weird twist to the way the chords move, or something about the form. There’s something hip in all of those tunes. And I mean there’s certainly many other songs that I could have played that did not quite have enough meat on them. Those songs, every one of them has like significant meat.

AKB: You just said: Something hip. Do you think an artist has to adapt to the development in music business to be hip? Did you ever have to adapt your style?

PM: I don’t adapt my style because I am way too stubborn to do that. I play the way I play. I listen the way I listen. And I really do feel that musicians have an obligation to be really honest about what they love and to try to represent into sound what they love. That’s really simply what I have done over these years. And somehow I’ve gotten away with it (laughs). Let’s talk about the culture, the music that Bach wrote. His music. I mean how many people at the end of the service every Sunday came up and said: “Man, you know, you just wrote the greatest music that anybody will ever write for the next 300 years!” Maybe one person, two maybe?

AKB: And he did it every Sunday.

PM: Constantly. And there was nothing stopping it. And those were not great times to be a musician neither. But his real wealth had to do of then in the satisfaction himself of knowing that this stuff he was writing was, as we say in America, “the shit”.

AKB: But do you think he did all this composing because he loved music so much, or because he was obliged to have every Sunday a new mass?

PM: My sense with him is just this almost physical need to get that out to the world. My point is that: Yes, things go up, things go down, things do this, yes, music is really popular, music is not popular. To me, none of that matters. You just try to play good notes. That has its own value and it’s sort of timeless in a way. And that’s the only thing that I paid attention at it all the years.

Tour dates

30.10.2011 Hamburg, Jazz Festival   31.10.2011 Ruesselsheim, Theater 01.11.2011 Ludwigshafen, Theater im Pfalzbau 03.11.2011 Luzern (CH), KKL Luzern 04.11.2011 Ingolstadt, Stadthalle

Informations

www.patmetheny.com

Current release

What’s It All About 2011 Nonesuch Records / Warner EAN 0075597964707