E-Mail This Article to a Friend Where the chords have no names (continued)
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And what determined the length? "The length itself was determined by the material form, which is the length of a CD. . . . You know, this looming 76-minute boundary thing has been one that all of us that make CDs have had to deal with in one way or another. I mean, you either fill up the CD or you don’t. So that’s what we were shooting for: let’s write a piece that takes up the CD and make that the CD."

Metheny also sees the length as integral to a larger cultural statement the band wanted to make. On the one hand, he says that he and Mays have had to get used to the idea that, as the years go by, the PMG has become "kind of an island that is not connected to any continent in terms of style." But he says there’s another "larger cultural level of just how far removed we feel from a world where there’s now a chart in Billboard for ringtones, and how that just doesn’t line up with the reality that we have found in our own lives as musicians — that the kinds of things that have real value take a long time. It takes a lifetime to be able to address these kinds of issues compositionally or to be a good improviser or write a book. The kinds of values that I think we honor in everything that we try to do are not the kinds of values that would be found in a world where there’s a chart for ringtones. It’s kind of a protest to that culture. Maybe by going deeply into those kinds of issues of development, nuance, detail, and all those things that I hope are representative of music itself and hopefully in the other things that we’ve done, we can illuminate sort of a way up rather than, you know, in the infamous words of Trent [Reznor], ‘The Downward Spiral.’ "

When I suggest The Way Up as a post–September 11 disc, Metheny, who says he’s "appalled" by the "whole conservative movement in the world culturally and certainly politically," says, "I think it’s there. One of our jobs as musicians is to report on the times that we live in, and I feel that jazz in particular is very, very well suited to do that. You know, it’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me that there are very few modern jazz guys that really kind of go full at the issues of the times and use the modern tools of our time to express some kind of poetic look at that time. To me, that’s part of what jazz is — the way that jazz guys have been able to filter the culture and the sounds of their time through the prism that the sophistication of jazz offers." Metheny says some of it’s a matter of using modern technology, Digital Performer, ProTools — "these are technological things that color the output somehow. And one mission of the band from the beginning has been to address the tools of our time, to try to reconcile these things with the quote-unquote tradition."

Then there’s the album’s advanced harmonic language (another vertical form!), which Metheny sees as very much part of the time. "You know, we got into lots of areas where there are no longer definable chords. We do our best to define them, but trying just to come up with names for these chords was almost funny. It’s not your usual major, minor, diminished, augmented chord. They go beyond that. That to me has been kind of in the works for the last 40 to 50 years with people like Wayne Shorter. To me, this kind of application of that harmonic stuff is something particular to this time."

Performing such a complexly written, long piece in concert has been a challenge. "It’s kind of like learning ‘Giant Steps’ or something like that, but times 20 just in terms of the amount of stuff that you have to remember harmonically. We all had to practice for several months individually before we all got together." And Metheny does insist that the band memorize the piece. "As an improvising musician, you can certainly have a chart up there for chord symbols, but it’s not the same somehow. Even on a tactile level, it’s sort of like you see ‘G-minor 7, flat 5’ and you go, ‘Okay, that’s a Locrean scale.’ Because the thing is, when you’re improvising on something that’s complicated, you have to not memorize the chord, you have to memorize the map. It’s sort of like, you have to know the whole map of an area because you want to be able to improvise your route each time. So you have to know, ‘Oh, I can’t go there because there’s a tree there, and I can’t go there because there’s a house there.’ You have to know the whole map. If you don’t know the whole map, then you’re just kinda gonna stay on the streets, which is what the chord symbols would be. And you don’t want to do that; you want to be able to go off-road."

Besdies, says Metheny, "I don’t like having music on the bandstand. I think that for the amount of bread that people are paying for tickets and for the amount of gigs we’re gonna do, we should be able to present this music just as what it is without having to have charts."

The Pat Metheny Group plays the Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Place in Boston, this Saturday, March 26; call (617) 931-2000.