“Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words,” reflection 2 – Neither This ‘Nor That
A favorite concern of writers who have contributed to the discourse about Pat Metheny is “what kind of music is it?” Metheny is certainly not alone among those whose work emerged during the 1970s and doesn’t fit within a neat genre box. There are many ways this perceived tension is articulated. Here is a brief list of my favorites:
“Is it jazz?” – “if it isn’t jazz, why is a jazz musician playing it?” – “it sure sounds like jazz so why doesn’t it follow therules?” – “if its jazz, why are we hearing electric/electronic instruments?” – “it might sound like jazz if it only swung more” – “it sounds like a pop song so why are the musicians improvising” – “why is this tune so loud if the previous one was so quiet?” – “why are the dynamics changing so often in this one tune?” I’ll stop there, but as you can see, I could easily fill the rest of this page with 31 additional flavors of similar ideas.
There are those who express a desire for their music to sound “just the way it used to.” Similarly, there are those who yearn for “that old time religion.” As if there has ever been an “Ur“ moment that defines everything that historically follows a precursor. Alas, music like religion changes, absorbing all kinds of influences and perspectives as it encounters new times and places. Often the very things people yearn for seem “golden” in retrospect, while in their own time were considered out of fashion. Big bands of the 1930s didn’t want to sound like the “old fashioned” musicians out of New Orleans/Chicago. While Bach’s own children were considered novel, their father’s work was viewed as a relic of the past.
The yearning for a time “before everything changed” represents resistance to new ideas. A kind of purism greets new conceptions that seem to cross categories that are considered to lose their integrity if breached. When Tony Williams, Gary Burton, Larry Coryell and Bob Moses, Miles Davis, and others became influenced by the sounds of rock and other streams of music, it was inevitable that jazz purists were going to respond negatively. In reality, there has never been a time when the music was an amalgam of sometimes contrasting contemporaneous influences. Many “jazz” musicians have been the same people recording the instrumentals on rhythm and blues songs, playing bar mitzvah and wedding music, studying with orchestral musicians… Musicians are often truly people of their world. Creative musicians have ears that listen deep and wide.
There is often resistance to “this” sounding like “that.” This is really but one example of the manner in which the world is often conceptualized as a collection of mutually exclusive bins. One is a jazz musician or an orchestral musician, a rock musician or a jazz musician, white or Black, woman or man, a writer of pop songs or a composer of “serious” music, human or an animal (of course humans are an animal specie). I find it encouraging that some young musicians today increasingly pay little heed to the categories into which they are expected to be situated. There needn’t be a conflict between a deep skill set within a historical musical stream (or two or three) while in practice blurring these distinctions.
During the 1970s, when Pat Metheny began his mature professional career, musicians who weren’t easily categorized were termed jazz-rock, rock-jazz, or “fusion.” Personally, I’ve never understood these terms since they imply bridging categories whose distinctions I often fail to often find very useful. Musical history doesn’t really know such distinctions, although they are the stuff of music textbooks and marketing. In a sense, it is understandable that some would label music built on vamps and riffs – but played by improvising jazz musicians – by a new category or sub-category name. But how useful is this really?
Maybe writers have been confused by Pat Metheny because his music, often electric, has resisted riffs and vamps as organizing principles, while his melodies can reflect the sensibilities of popular musicians, be they rock musicians like The Beatles or Brazilian songwriters like Milton Nascimento.
Much can be written about the Beatles and Nascimento influences on Pat Metheny (and you’ll have to read my forthcoming book to learn more!), but tracing these can provide insight into his music. I say this at the risk of overgeneralizing – Metheny is so prolific as to deflect global statements. His melodies can be tuneful and unfolding like a narrative, his harmonies and bassline constructions can at times draw upon the Beatles, the surface simplicity masking an underlying complexity. One of the most useful insights that Pat Metheny Group bassist Steve Rodby suggested to me was that it is useful to listen to the music’s pop qualities while remaining attuned to the ways the musicians think like jazz musicians – ever flexible, responsive, and in the moment. Music can be simple and complex at the same time, tuneful and intricate, resting in neither this category nor that one.
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