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	THE PAT METHENY GROUP UTILITY PLAYERS

How do you make a complicated, highly produced jazz album work in concert? The Pat Metheny Group’s The Way Up (Nonesuch) is a through-composed long-form piece that’s unusual for small jazz band — or any jazz band, for that matter. To sustain its 68-minute length, composers Metheny and Lyle Mays deploy continuous harmonic and rhythmic development as well as textural and dynamic variety. And they use all the tricks of state-of-the art production, not the least being good old-fashioned multiple guitar tracks.

How to pull this off live? Well, one way is to hire an extra guitarist. Another is to make sure everyone in the band can double on an alternate instrument — or even triple. At the Orpheum last Saturday, the PMG added second guitarist Nando Lauria, who also played percussion and vibes. Harmonica player Grégoire Maret did guitar and percussion (including marimba). Trumpeter Cuong Vu played percussion. And Maret, Lauria, and Vu all sang. Steve Rodby played acoustic and electric basses, and Mays had his usual nest of keyboards (abetted by a Macintosh laptop).

Metheny, meanwhile, kept changing guitars, sliding his blond hollow-bodied electric behind his back as he stepped forward to play a 12-string set up on a stand, or unstrapping the hollow-body, with its light, classic "jazz" sound, in favor of the space-age sustains of his synth guitar, or resorting to a handful of others.

The concert began with Metheny coming down to the lip of the stage, where he sat on a speaker cabinet and played a slow intro over a pre-recorded percussion track before the rest of the band joined him, beating out the piece’s insistent rapid pulse rhythm on toy xylophones. They were soon under full steam. Although Metheny has prided himself on the lack of repeats in The Way Up, there is one beautiful, short, soaring melody that recurs throughout in variations — and there’s that rhythm. But in the meantime, the piece keeps changing. Standard 4/4 and triple meters were orchestrated by the remarkable drummer Antonio Sanchez, who subdivided the beat, played against it, and gave the soloists something to play against too. In its harmony, rhythm, and melody the piece kept ascending — pausing, yes, and dropping into ballad tempos too, but always striving for the way up, and refreshing the ear at every step.

After a short pause, the band played another hour and a half of material from their vast book. An extremely fast boppish duet between Metheny and Sanchez showed just how good Metheny is at playing jazz. And when the band played one rock-like number over a hard four-to-the-bar kick-drum beat that was again complicated by all manner of cross-rhythms, they were downright infallible.