Growing up in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, U.S. Metheny won a Down Beat scholarship and attended a one-week jazz camp at 15, under the creative wing of guitarist Attila Zoller, who subsequently invited young Metheny to New York City, U.S. to meet Jim Hall and Ron Carter. After a brief stint studying at the University of Miami, he was soon offered a teaching position there, before moving to Boston, U.S. to the Berklee College of Music where he made a name for himself as the wildly talented teenager with a teaching assitantship along with jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton.
Playing and contributing to a number of groups including Gary Burton’s band, Metheny soon began releasing his own material including his debut album “Bright Size Life” and the follow-up 1977’s “Watercolours” featuring pianist and long-term collaborator Lyle Mays.
Before long Metheny became ECM’s top artist and one of the most popular jazzmen of all time, making a name for himself for his highly creative, unpredictable style, with his freelance side projects often producing the most dynamic and unexpected results. The list of artists Metheny has worked with is impressively long and includes the likes of Ornettle Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Dave Holland and David Bowie.
In 1977 he founded the Pat Metheny Group, and their first release in 1978, featured the infamous writing duo of Metheny and Mays, which would go on to span 25 years and 15 albums. The group's sophomore album “American Garage” (1980) hit the mainstream with an upbeat opening track “(Cross the) Heartland” which became synonymous with the band’s success. The Pat Metheny Group went on to explore their sound, experimenting with various styles of music; inspired by new members Nana Vasconcelos and Aznar the band introduced latin-induced music to the group for the album “Offramp”.
The band left ECM records following a dispute and released their subsequent albums “Still Life” (1987), “Letter From Home” (1989), “We Live Here” (1995), “Quartet” (1996) and “Imaginary Day” (1997) on Geffen Records, the latter three represented a move away from the Latin style that had influenced many of their earlier albums.
Metheny continues to tour with an impressive line-up of musicians, has received many Grammy Awards, the first five of which were consecutive in the category of Best Jazz Fusion Performance, and remains one of the greatest progressive jazz musicians in the world.
Four decades on, and Pat Metheny is still touring relentlessly, still pushing the boundaries of contemporary jazz and fusion. I last saw him with his Orchestrion project when it came to London in February 2010.
He'd built an incredible one-man orchestra with the help of some engineering wizardry – but it was still Metheny in the driving seat. The unmistakably lyrical lines were translated to all manner of instruments (air blown over bottles, all kinds of percussion, xylophones, a piano, bass), all of which he controlled from his guitar with the easy, unassuming virtuosity you'd expect from his performance.
Between charts he chats with the audience very easily, in this case relating anecdotes about the construction of the various instruments and demonstrating how he controlled them with the guitar, drawing us deeper into the experience (even though the Barbican isn't the most intimate of performance spaces).
Despite the incredible showmanship and novelty of the Orchestrion project, one moment really shines out as representing Pat Metheny: the consummate musician. When he came to play the last number, the technical kit failed – after a couple of false starts and the intervention of some technicians, Metheny pulled a stool to the front of the stage and sat down with his guitar (uncoupled from the array of instruments). And then he began to play, improvising a solo performance – just him and that gorgeous guitar. It was like magic, everyone was on the edge of their seat, and the applause and standing ovation at the end dwarfed the reactions to all the other tunes he'd played that night.
tomclarke
In deinem Konto anmelden
