Pat Metheny’s Cinematic Vision

By Bobby Reed I Dec. 4, 2020

Guitarist Pat Metheny topped two DownBeat Readers Poll categories this year: Guitar and Jazz Album, for his disc *From This Place* (Nonesuch).
(Photo: Jimmy & Dena Katz)

“Probably within 50 miles of here, I could find 200 people now who could play ‘Giant Steps’ in all 12 keys backwards and forwards,” he asserted. “It used to be, you couldn’t find anybody who could do that. But now, that kind of fluency is abundant. Now, it’s almost taken for granted that you’re going to be a good player and a good musician.

“But to get that level of fluency combined with [a playing style that makes me think] “What was that?”—it’s like every 10 years or so somebody comes on like that. James [Francies] is in that category. And he’s still very young.”

Metheny also heaped praise on Dyson, calling him “one of the most exciting drummers I’ve heard in years.”

Although Side-Eye hasn’t released an album yet, the band did recently film a performance in Japan. Metheny was pleased with the footage, though he generally isn’t interested in concert films.

“I don’t really like the visual thing that much,” he said. “If there was a way of doing what I do while invisible, I would love that—because to me, it’s not really about the image of the people playing; it is only about what it sounds like.

The guitarist, who is an avid reader, explained that the pandemic-related break from touring had afforded him the opportunity to tackle several books, including biographies of Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, as well as physicist David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (Penguin).

“Like probably half the people on the planet, I’m about three quarters of the way through [Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York], which is, for somebody who lives in New York, both fascinating and infuriating,” he said with a chuckle, referring to the 1,344-page tome.

This extended period of time off the road also has given Metheny an itch to revisit a backlog of compositional ideas. “This is the chance to finish those 70 halfway-done tunes that have been sitting there,” he said. “I know there might be some good tunes there, just waiting to get finished. And out of that 70, I’m going to get 10 [good ones], because my batting average is about that.” DB

This story originally was published in the December 2020 issue of DownBeat. Subscribe here.