Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Where the chords have no names
The Pat Metheny Group takes the long view
BY JON GARELICK

I’ve never been a fan of the Pat Metheny Group. Pat Metheny the jazz guitarist, yes. His startling debut trio record at the age of 21, Bright Size Life (ECM, 1975), yes. His live album 80/81 (ECM, 1981) with Michael Brecker, Dewey Redman, and Charlie Haden, yes. Song X (Geffen, 1985) with Ornette Coleman, muy yes! His dirty solo grunge guitar experiment Zero Tolerance for Silence (Geffen, 1992), yes again. And any number of guitar-trio records, collaborations with Haden, Joshua Redman, Jim Hall, and so on — all yes. But the Group — the PMG — has had an inclination to amplify what I like least about Metheny: his octave-layered sweet tones and synthed-up harmonies, his sometimes toothache-sweet melodies. Even his more Brazilian and "world"-flavored pieces, though admirable in many ways, have pretty much left me cold.

Maybe that’s because as he was coming on with the Group (which released its debut recording on ECM in 1978), I was pushing into the late-’70s/early-’80s avant-garde of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill’s Air, Steve Lacy, and, here in Boston, the Fringe. I wanted only Metheny’s Ornette-ish side. The PMG was over there, busting up the charts, filling stadiums, but never drawing me in.

Which is why I’m so surprised to have fallen in love with the PMG’s latest, The Way Up (Nonesuch). I can’t say that all that much has changed, unless it’s me. Metheny still writes all the music with PMG co-founder and keyboardist Lyle Mays. There’s still an essential sweetness to its music, an ingratiating poppiness. But there’s something else too.

The Way Up emerges from traffic noise, with the sound of toy instruments beating out a tricky odd meter. Drummer Antonio Sanchez picks up the beat; that’s followed by a repeated arpeggiated cascade in piano, what sounds like sitar, and various acoustic guitars, and then there’s a digitalized whoosh! transition in the mix, followed by a variation on the arpeggiated figure from the piano, gradual modulation up, and eventually the first solo electric-guitar line over that percolating beat. There’s an answering unison variation from harmonica (Gregoire Maret) and trumpet (Cuong Vu), then a more soaring sustained guitar figure, a return of the arpeggiated figures, a big fuzz-bass cadence, and then a wonderful huffing harmonium sound with a touch of one of Maret’s pure, vibratoless high notes. There are pauses, breaks for short bits of melody, and always that insistent beat before the segment returns to placid acoustic-guitar figurations.

So there are the same surface textures of sweetness and light, but there’s also a lot of detail in the midst of all that transparency. The piece moves into its second section without pause, and here Metheny makes his first beautiful ascending melodic statement. It’s the only portion of the piece that repeats, says Metheny, and it’s a beauty.

Perhaps it’s that lack of repetition that keeps this piece continually fresh over the course of its 68 minutes and 10 seconds. Using shifting rhythms, the tension and release of complex harmonies, and a subtle attention to dynamics, Mays and Metheny create long, satisfying arcs of narrative development. And whenever the music threatens to become too sugary, they cut the music off at the knees with another digital whoosh and shift to another rhythm, another soloist, a passage of straight-ahead up-tempo jazz swing, some vigorous bowed cello from bassist Steve Rodby. Chalk it up to the power of the title’s suggestion, or the upward striving of that signature melody in Part Two, or even the vertical design of the CD booklet, with its variation on the urban lamp post, but the feeling of The Way Up is one of continual ascendancy. And it’s enhanced by an undercurrent of sadness: in the childlike arias from Maret’s harmonica, in the album’s quiet, fade-out resolution. The urban theme (again, echoed in the cover art, with its street scenes and taxi cabs) also makes this very much a post–September 11 jazz album.

The long form has been a bugaboo of jazz — improvised music works best in repeated short forms. There’s always the argument made about long forms that they’re not really long — just collections of short forms. But Metheny and Mays have created a true long form — even with its pauses and stops, it’s a continually evolving, unfolding piece. Critic Whitney Balliett called Ellington’s short pieces "mini-concertos" (and so did Ellington, in "Concerto for Cootie"). These three and four-minute pieces were not "songs" (whatever their melodic content) but short, multi-section pieces for orchestra. The same is true of The Way Up, but there’s nothing "mini" about it.

"We’ve always had tunes that were 10, 12, 15 minutes long," Metheny tells me over the phone from the road in St. Louis, "and even a couple of records that were kind of hinting at a continuous kind of feeling, like As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls." He names a couple of others — Secret Story (Geffen, 1992), Imaginary Day (Warner Bros. 1997). "But at best you could say those were suites, groups of disparate material that was linked under a single umbrella. This is fundamentally different in the sense that the piece itself is conceived and written as a piece that would address all of the possibilities of development that come with extended composition, and in fact, that’s sort of the fun of it from the writing side — putting together the puzzle that ultimately makes up what the form of the piece is."

page 1  page 2 

Issue Date: March 25 - 31, 2005
Back to the Music table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group