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A Fireside Chat with Pat Metheny
by AAJ Staff
Defying definition and escaping categorization, Pat Metheny's contributions to jazz have been downplayed. But Metheny, relaxed, seems to be at peace and untroubled by his perceived enigma.All About Jazz: With the suspension of the jazz at Warner Bros., Nonesuch is a fashionable lateral move.Pat Metheny: My situation was unique in the sense that since 1984, when I left ECM, I started my own production company. Basically, we license our records to record companies. I haven't been ...
Continue ReadingPat Metheny Group Heats Up Toronto
by Alain Londes
Following its Buffalo appearance, the Pat Metheny Group performed its second concert of the anticipated world tour before a capacity crowd at the Hummingbird Center in Toronto on February 18. This was the same location where the group performed three years ago on the last world tour. Metheny recognized Toronto as a major center for the arts.
As the audience entered the concert hall and looked for their seats, they could already hear the Reichian introduction to the group's ... Continue ReadingPat Metheny Group in Potsdam, NY
by John Kelman
Pat Metheny Group shows have, over the years, evolved into more than mere musical performance; they are events , with the production values of a rock and roll show including a technological stage set-up second to none in the jazz world (and many in the rock world, for that matter) and, with well-conceived lighting and a large rear projection screen, a multimedia affair to boot. This fits well with the fact that, while improvisation is a key component of any ...
Continue ReadingPat Metheny Group: The Way Up
by Alain Londes
City traffic noises briefly lead into an inviting, fast introduction. Such is the opening of the Pat Metheny Group's most recent release.
Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays, the original Group's brain trust, have created a 68-minute suite that encapsulates a number of stylistic devices introduced throughout the history of their collaboration. Steve Rodby continues to lay the grounding with his acoustic and electric bass, as well as cello. Trumpeter Cuong Vu and drummer Antonio Sanchez continue ... Continue ReadingPat Metheny Group: The Way Up
by Mark Sabbatini
Pat Metheny hasn't exactly been on a roll lately. The guitarist typically alternates safe and daring work, satisfying mainstream hordes while reassuring purists he's still among the modern masters. But lately it's been more mellow and less leaving the nest, and some of it sounds long in the tooth.
So it's refreshing that, even though The Way Up is another album by the mainstream- oriented Pat Metheny Group, it contains just four tracks, three of which are between ...
Continue ReadingPat Metheny Group: The Way Up
by Doug Collette
Titled with his customary forward-thinking optimism, The Way Up is Pat Metheny's first project for Nonesuch Records. For all its intricacy, this ambitious group endeavor, a single extended composition in four parts, brings to mind the earliest, and comparatively simpler, works of the guitarist composer when he first established a four-piece band under his own name back in 1978.
The lyricism that has drawn and retained listeners for close to thirty years appears in abundance here, but there's also plenty ...
Continue ReadingThe Way Up
by John Kelman
Like him or not, the one thing you cannot accuse guitar icon Pat Metheny of is complacency. Over the course of his thirty-year career he has tackled everything from the Midwestern folk sensibility of New Chautauqua to the free-spirited interplay of his collaboration with Ornette Coleman, Song X. But as significant and diverse as his solo efforts have been, the project that has been most near and dear to his heart has been Pat Metheny Group, now in its 27th ...
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