“Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words” – Reflection 6 – “tell me, how do these books come about?”
Recently, an old friend asked me why I had chosen to write about Pat Metheny. There are, in fact, compelling reasons for this choice – as I’ve previously written: I’m fascinated by the ideas that drive Pat Metheny’s approach to composing, the way he integrates composing and improvisation, the long imaginative arcs of his musical gestures, his resistance to rigid “genre” boundary lines, the beauty of his compositions and playing… I could go on, but…
This is now my fourth book within 12 years, but I don’t think that I actively choose most of my topics. I know this may sound cliche but they seem to choose me.
I never set out to write an Mwandishi book, although I was writing about that band a propos collaborations between electronic musicians and jazz musicians – Herbie Hancock & Patrick Gleeson, Anthony Braxton & Richard Teitelbaum, and others. I started talking at length to Herbie and his former band members, comparing and contrasting multiple performances of the same repertoire, found that I had a fair bit to say. People started telling me that this is a book and I responded, for a time, “ok, if so, then you write it!” But the next thing you know, I had a book contract and 19 drafts later, voila, a book!
The next book, what I refer to as the “Children of Ornette: Miles ‘Lost’/Anthony Braxton/Circle…” book (officially: “The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles”) was intentionally a follow-up to the first. This time I made the conscious decision to fill out more of the historical period addressed in the Mwandishi band book.
An alternate sequel might have been about the 1970-71 period for Wayne Shorter and early Weather Report, but for a variety of reasons.l it is summarized in a (long) footnote in the “Miles Lost Quintet” book. As it turns out, there is now a Weather Report book in print, but it may be something I return to at a later date.
In the case of Pat Metheny, the idea arose while I was working on something completely different, but which wasn’t really working. Part of that abandoned project was published as an ebook about Paul Winter. Several older blog posts address other slices of what I had working on (about embodiment, metaphor, non-human species…) which may crop up again in future writing.
Meanwhile, I had been enjoying periodic conversations with Pat without the slightest thought that I might write a book about him. As I narrate in the introduction to the new book, one day he gave me one of his newly published songbooks. What I did with it followed a familiar pattern of mine – while I was rehearsing for an upcoming album release, I played my way through maybe 100+ of the Metheny tunes rather than working on the album material.
This led to my taking 15 of the tunes, some simple and some quite complex, into gigs I had booked. And as usual, once I start playing something a lot, I find myself fascinated by what makes it tick. I started to think about the Metheny compositions in a deeper, more analytical, and ultimately writerly kind of way, and I was off and running. Many conversations and musical explorations later, a book began to take shape. He was open to the idea, and three years later, here we are.
The book is now complete and about to enter production. It’s been scheduled for an August 2024 release by University of Chicago Press, my third round with that marvelous publishing house!
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