At 67, Pat Metheny, one of the most famous jazz artists in the world, is performing on Saturday May 21 in Paris, at the Olympia, where he has not played for five years. The Missouri native guitarist, based in New York, is currently on a world tour of around 60 dates until October 2022. He will present his latest album there Side-Eye NYC, released in September 2021, successor to Road to the Sun (2021) and From this Place (2020). In this live disc for which Metheny has invited young musicians from the New York scene (James Francies on keyboards and organ, Marcus Gilmore on drums), new compositions rub shoulders with rereadings of some of his classics.
It Starts When we Disappearopening track of the album Side-Eye NYC (2021)
In almost half a century of professional career, Pat Metheny has never stopped pushing the limits of his instrument and of music, multiplying the most daring projects and initiating the craziest inventions. “I had the chance to lead a life as a musician where I was able to approach, consider and deepen very diverse subjects and issues”, told AFP Pat Metheny.
From the beginning, Pat Metheny was passionate about the sounds he could get from a guitar and, very quickly, his Gibson was no longer enough for him. From his second album, Watercolorspublished in 1976, he also discovered all the possibilities that synthesizers could offer him.
“He did a lot for the guitar, for modern music”, British jazz-fusion guitarist John McLaughlin told AFP. “In the early 80s, he had already done a strange job, with the two amps on stage, oriented especially to obtain this kind of panorama of sound.” This detail shows the perfectionism of Metheny who refuses, 47 years after his first record in 1975, at only 21 years old, any form of sclerosis.
Among his discoveries: the use and improvement of a guitar-synth or the invention, with a Canadian luthier, of the Pikasso guitar with 42 strings and several necks, with a cubist aspect. In the early 2010s, Pat Metheny took his experiments even further with the Orchestrion, a giant machine whose strange robot-instruments he animated using pedals connected to his guitar.
Better Days Aheadtrack from 1989 revisited in the new album
All this work as a sound architect, Pat Metheny has always tried to put it at the service of a real musical project. “For me, music implies the possibility of understanding things. Things that go far beyond the music itself”, he advances.
Metheny, a casual look with his plaid shirts, sailor sweaters, jeans and lion’s mane, is a master in the art of telling stories, triggering emotions, taking his audience to distant galaxies by pulling his guitars celestial melodies. “Beyond the guitarist, there is the musician, able to ignore the guitar to access the stage above, to everything that allows to reach intensity”, emphasizes guitarist Sylvain Luc.
The fields of investigation he explores are multiple. Pat Metheny could not be satisfied with jazz, where he measured himself against the greatest, as the only vector of his art. The one who claims as influences as much the Beatles as Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis or James Taylor, has reconciled lovers of jazz, folk, rock, Californian pop, new age… Which explains his popularity and his enormous hit.
timelinea track that Metheny composed for Michael Brecker’s album Time is of the Essence (1999), revisited in Side-Eye NYC
“He always went elsewhere to feed his jazz in a different way, while being very anchored in his traditional folk roots”, notes Sylvain Luc. With his phrasing as a common thread, his art of legato consisting in linking the notes, which constitutes his DNA. “The first time I heard him, in a quartet with Gary Burton (vibraphonist), I had already been struck by the fluidity of the sound and this work around the tone”, confirms Sylvain Luc.
Multicard, Pat Metheny however defends himself from any dispersion. “The playing environments I’ve put together over the years are all different versions of my vision of what my music can be,” he believes. “Some musicians move through life like a molting snake, moving from one thing to another. For me, it’s more of a process of adding on top of a pre-existing structure, like adding extensions to a house.”
Pat Metheny at the Olympia, in Paris, Saturday May 21, 2022, 8 p.m.