I never traveled far to hear the great Pat Metheny perform. I never had to. The damn guy, that slack-jawed Midwestern jazz yokel in his striped shirts and his running shoes, kept coming to watch me listen. And if you check the records of the theaters and clubs near everywhere you’ve ever lived, you will probably find he’s been stalking you, too, for the better part of five decades.
Pat Metheny performs at the Bardavon Theater on April 13 at 8 p.m.
When I went away to SUNY Brockport, it was the 80/81 band in the campus ballroom: Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian. The nusic was a little over the head of this 18-year-old. When I transferred to SUNY Oswego, it was the (ah!) classic Pat Metheny Group (PMG) in the nearby Landmark Theater in Syracuse.
That was the one time I met him. I made a joke, and he laughed.
Over intersession, it was version 1.5 of the PMG (the transitional Offramp lineup) in the dimly lit and darkly reverberant Vassar Chapel. When I graduated and returned to the Hudson Valley, it was the fully formed v.2 of the PMG (Rodby/Wertico/Aznar, for those keeping score) at The Chance of all places, making that notoriously difficult room sound like Bayreuth.
Over the years, several visits to the Bardavon followed, including an especially memorable quartet show with the Brad Mehldau t rio.
And I’ll be at the Bardavon when Pat brings his true solo guitar tour to town. One guitar in a 900-seat theater? I am unconcerned. As a provider of a live music experience, Metheny never disappoints.
It all started between us in the late Seventies in what is now called the Studley Theater at SUNY New Paltz, a five-minute walk — via grassy shortcuts and private driveways — from my uptown New Paltz home. I was a teenager whose ears were just beginning to open to jazz and fusion. That first PMG record — the White Album, the other White Album — was at that precise moment my very favorite thing in the world, a game-changing, luminous record that levitated off the jazz charts and into the Billboard top 50 (perhaps following the rather shocking commercial success of his ECM labelmate Keith Jarrett’s The Koln Concert).
Those perfect-storm alignments are rare: going to see the artist himself perform the music that is already playing involuntarily in your head throughout the day and in your young, wet brain’s vibrant dreaming at night. That Studley Theater show lives on for me as a preserved — nay, an illumined memory — brighter than life, due in part to one of the many ways in which Pat Metheny departed from jazz customs. He embraced a rock theatricality that many austere jazz artists, mainstream and avant, abjure, favoring the default jazz visuals and values of the smoky club or the black-tie concert-hall setting. Metheny took the transportative, world-making part of concerts seriously, even as he dressed jazz, down to striped shirts and running shoes.
It was nothing far outside jazz’s time-honored performance traditions, No inflatable pigs, just well-coordinated lighting, long hair, and stage manners as physical as the demands of the music would allow (for example, Pat and the late/great Lyle Mays both thrusting their right arms high in the air during the famous glissandos in “San Lorenzo”). There were the occasional moments of pure theater. One time, the band entered through the aisles, playing marching music like the ragtag remnants of a defeated colonial fife-and-drum corps. Part of Metheny’s genius, a small but important part, was for marketing, branding spin.
As to the other parts of his genius, where even to begin? Has anyone ever so effectively balanced crossover appeal with serious jazz practice and advancement? Looking across his career, it sometimes seems that whenever his commercial success would cross a certain threshold, it would trigger a spate of serious, challenging jazz records meant for the knowing jazz crowd and not so much for you and me. For every White Album or American Garage or David Bowie collab, there would be two or three like 80/81, Song X with Ornette Coleman, the exceptional Question and Answer with Dave Holland and Roy Haynes, or — heaven forefend! — Zero Tolerance for Silence, the noisy, dissonant solo-guitar record that had his fans questioning whether it was a contractual obligation F.U. to David Geffen, some kind of cruel joke, or perhaps evidence of a mental breakdown. It has since emerged as a significant avant-garde work, famously cited as an influence by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
These days, he’s just Pat Metheny and say no more. He’s checked every box, and so has to keep inventing new ones. He has revolutionized the art and the sound of his instrument, brought serious jazz to new audiences worldwide, extended the compositional range and source materials of the form, crossed over to folk and to classical, pioneered a world music deserving of the name, and force-fed new technologies to what can be a strangely luddite genre.
Like Miles, his long-running bands have been prep school for future innovators and stars. He has honored legends and championed underattended fellow artists at every turn. In so doing, like Wynton Marsalis and the very few other titans in that position, he has done his part to define an inclusive jazz canon. With his collaboration with the late, divisive avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey, Pat drew a map of the canonical jazz terrain so wide and welcoming and weird that he probably outraged more than half his core audience. But he is Pat Metheny, so say no more.
d Intermission D
Look, many jazz musicians have this special way of making sure that the rest of us understand that we don’t really understand. Sometimes, it ain’t pretty. Nobody owns music, and someone should remind them of that. Other times, however, for me at least, it is necessary medicine, tough love. When I stray too far outside my lanes of authority, I am the one who needs the reminder that maybe I don’t fully understand the gravity and the inner workings of America’s premiere contribution to serious music. I love it, but am I qualified to speak for it?
So I hereby welcome a few of our own Hudson Valley jazz guitarists to this swollen and intemperate rant: Ken McGloin, an exceedingly clever and iconoclastic guitarist and music educator who has been enlivening the mid-Hudson music scene for decades; Matt Finck, a straight virtuoso guitarist to my ears who is also a wonderful tune writer (check out the Finck-Ball project); and headlining is my older brother, Dave Burdick, a Berklee-schooled guitarist and University of Texas-trained composer, recently retired professor of music and founder of the commercial music program at Millikin University, studio owner, and mentor to hundreds if not thousands, starting of course with me.
What stories — in their own words — do these three have to say about the influence of Metheny on them?
“In 1974,” says Ken McGloin, “I traded my Gary Burton album (featuring Mick Goodrick and Pat Metheny on guitar) for Jeff Beck’s Wired without realizing what I had given away. A few years later, after becoming a jazz enthusiast and attending the University of Miami, I discovered that Metheny and Jaco had left their mark on that jazz department.
“My guitar teacher, Peter Harris, was a friend of Pat’s and showed me how to hold the pick like he did, but it never felt right. I eventually learned that you have to find a way that works best for you. During my first lesson with Peter, he had me play ‘Donna Lee,’ only picking the upbeats and slurring all the downbeats. Then he had me solo using the arpeggios of the song and connecting lines with half-steps. This exercise is similar to one that I believe Pat uses to this day.
“In February 1980, I was on the second floor of the practice rooms. There was talk that Metheny would be visiting that day, as he was promoting American Garage in Miami that weekend. The hallways were pretty empty when he suddenly appeared, peering into practice rooms, and then entering one.
“I rushed to the door he went into, and there was a student guarding it like a bouncer. He let me in, and there were four of us in the small practice room. Pat and a student guitarist were just starting ‘Autumn Leaves’ in E minor. To my surprise, as I thought I was going to be blown away by millions of notes, Pat utilized the guitar by playing open strings, harmonics, double stops, and creating a texture over the song. His touch was light but deliberate. This experience changed the way I looked at playing jazz.”
Matt Finck’s love affair with the guitar was not originally sparked by Metheny.
“I came to his music later in my life,” he says. “A close friend, Bob Margolis, invited me to a Pat Metheny performance at SUNY Purchase sometime in the early 2000’s. The energy and interaction of Pat and his band were eye-opening and mind-altering. Like seeing a professional sporting event live for the first time, the scope of what I was hearing and seeing was realized on a different level than if I were to just be listening to an audio recording.
“The second time I saw Pat, I believe, was the tour in support of The Way Up, in 2005. The concert was at The Egg in Albany and it was there that I fully realized Pat’s extraordinary musical brilliance. He began with a 45-minute solo guitar set that displayed an entirely different side of his touch. The sound he created on the Linda Manzer acoustic guitar was so earthy. His pillowy plucks coupled with his soulful voice-led chordal displays were poetry in motion.
“The rest of the band joined Pat on stage and proceeded to perform The Way Up suite in its entirety. The final hour of the concert featured Pat breaking off into different duo, trio, and quartet configurations spotlighting Antonio Sanchez, Lyle Mays, and Christian McBride. By the end of the three-hour performance I had come to realize the breadth and brilliance of Pat as a composer, guitarist, bandmate and performer.
“I have yet to listen to every Metheny recording, but I plan to. The two I’ve listened to the most would be Trio 99-00 album release followed up by a two-CD live release the following year with Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart. Words seem to fail me when I try to describe the world of Pat Metheny or its effect on me.”
Dave Burdick speaks to Metheny’s impact on him.
“I know I am speaking for a ton of other guys like me,” he says. “When I was young. I was really into the Brit blues guys. Those of us who were very young in the Sixties and Seventies and learning guitar, at least growing up in a white middle-class town like we did, we didn’t know who the real blues cats were. I got it from the Brits, but the Brits would always say, ‘Oh, you gotta check out Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon and B.B. King and Albert King and Freddie King.’
“But at that same time, as you know, we were getting a dose of very serious music from Dad. In our house, J.S. Bach and Charlie Parker reigned supreme as the intellectual giants of linear melody. That has been a beautiful thing over the course of my life, understanding that a black bebopper and an 18th-century German were on an equal pedestal. And we were surrounded by the music of Bill Evans and Jim Hall.
“So there I was, like everyone else who had discovered jazz and wanted to find a way to navigate harmony and improvisation. Where’s my path through this? I can’t deny that I love blues and rock and say, ‘Oh, I am through with that and am only going to play jazz now.’ And into that comes Pat, and he did it so far out of left field, no one saw it coming. It was beautiful, it was clean, it wasn’t angsty and filled with distorted, fast fusion playing. When I first heard Pat, it practically broke my heart.
“The drag is that, probably like a bunch of other guys, I started losing myself in Pat’s thing. In fact I completely lost myself. When I came back from Berklee, I didn’t know who I was any more, and I put my jazz guitar under the bed and grabbed a Stratocaster and said, ‘I’m just going to worry about making a living with a guitar.’ I never renounced Pat; I just couldn’t try to play like that any more. Until I was 30 and change I felt like I just couldn’t get out from under his influence.
“Fast forward a lifetime, and I think Pat would smile if he heard me say this: he is the template for what a real, ever-forward musician should be. I stopped thinking about his guitar playing. I started thinking, man, this guy never stands in one spot. He keeps moving, like all the great ones. He’s a composer, arranger, producer, a shrewd businessman. He keeps learning new languages so he can play with new people. The story of Pat is, Just keep learning.
“The coda to the story is that, in the very recent past, I developed some tremor issues in my right hand and so my picking went to hell, so I started playing a lot with my thumb, and it was like, now I know who I am, I found my voice — flesh on steel. A physical limitation helped me find my own voice. The lesson of Pat is, One, learn your damn instrument. But when you’ve done that, now what? Who are you serving, what are you serving? And that’s where he is a luminary to me.
“I went to the International Association of Jazz Educators conference in Manhattan once, and Pat was the keynote speaker. So he came out into this big hotel conference of people who teach jazz at universities and high schools, and, almost in as many words, said, ‘Hey, you guys are not the gatekeepers. You don’t get to say what jazz is. It is those 13-and-14-year-olds out there right now. They get to say what jazz is.’ And half the people in the room, you could feel them puckering up. And the other half stood up and applauded.
“He said, ‘When you see that kid out in the hall with headphones on, making beats on his computer, send one your good jazz players from your big band out to work with this kid and see what they come up with.’”
See you at the Bardavon Theater on April 13. For tickets and additional information, visit https://www.bardavon.org.
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