Pat Metheny's Grand Vision
On the first day of recording From This Place, Pat Metheny’s latest release on Nonesuch, the 20-time Grammy-winning guitarist heard something that wasn’t there. “It was on the second take of the first tune,” he recalled in a recent interview in midtown Manhattan. “I thought, ‘Oh, I know what to do with this.’”
What Metheny heard was strings. An orchestra. Not as mere sweetening behind a soloist, as on the usual “with strings” albums, but as a vital compositional element enhancing the improvisations and ensemble playing of his quartet. In the way that CTI Records used strings on LPs in the 1960s-70s, when arranger Don Sibesky would take a jazz instrumental riff and blow it up to symphonic proportions.
“I always thought it was a kind of avant garde idea to get Herbie [Hancock] and Ron [Carter] and Grady [Tate] and orchestrate it,” Metheny explained. “What Sibesky did with the Herbie voicings—I thought, wow, that is such a great idea. And I’ve drawn on that idea many times over the years, not necessarily the way it manifested here, with a huge orchestra….But this album is overtly CTI.”
One of the things that made the CTI approach to orchestration so innovative back in the day was the use of multiple tracks—then a recent technological advancement—to overdub strings on recordings of the best improvisational musicians of the post-bop era. In the label’s heyday, founder Creed Taylor turned out enormously popular smooth jazz albums showcasing the talents of jazz greats like George Benson, Hubert Laws, Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine, and Milt Jackson; these albums generated significant disapproval among jazz critics who were put off by the albums’ frictionless sound. It was during these years that Metheny, a teen prodigy on jazz guitar, was coming of age musically.
Metheny acknowledges the CTI controversy and, without naming names, admits that he, too, has had trouble listening to some orchestrated jazz records. Metheny is not alone here—jazz instrumentalists in general have an uneasy relationship with strings albums, a reflection, perhaps, of a traditional divide between the jazz and classical worlds. Orchestral musicians, predominantly classical in musical orientation, don’t groove or improvise, so what can they bring to a jazz record?
Over the course of his career, as he’s edged ever closer to From This Place, Metheny has been exploring how strings might fit in a jazz setting. He worked with the London Orchestra on Secret Story (Geffen) in 1992, for instance, and included synthesized string parts on Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) for Verve in 1997. There were the movie soundtracks—The Falcon and the Snowman in 1985, Passaggio Per Il Paradiso in 1996, and The Map of the World in 1999. Then, in 2010 and 2013, respectively, he released Orchestrion and The Orchestrion Project (Nonesuch), experimenting with a full panoply of mechanized instruments controlled through his guitar. But none of these efforts reached the scale or complexity of the arrangements on the new release, in what Metheny describes as a culmination of several of his musical ambitions. “[This] is one of the records I’ve been waiting to make my whole life,” he wrote in the liner notes.
By the time Metheny brought his regular ensemble—drummer Antonio Sánchez, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and pianist Gwilym Simcock—into the studio to record the album, the four musicians had spent thousands of hours playing, talking, and laughing together as they traveled the world as the Evening With Pat Metheny group. Metheny knew them all well, both as musicians and as people: He had been working with Sánchez since 2000, Oh since 2012, and Simcock since 2016. Over time, proximity fostered perceptivity: “One of us can sneeze and the other three would find the chord in it,” Metheny joked. “We were so tuned into each other as a band.”
A pivotal conversation with famed bassist Ron Carter drove home to Metheny how valuable this kind of rapport is to a jazz ensemble. The two had been touring internationally as a duo, affording Metheny the opportunity to query the elder statesman about his time with the Miles Davis Quintet. (Carter was the legendary trumpeter’s bassist from 1963 to 1968.) One thing in particular puzzled Metheny: Why did the Quintet always play standards on their live gigs rather than the revolutionary material that they were recording?
The answer changed Metheny’s view of ensemble playing—and the way he would proceed with the then-upcoming album. By playing standards night after night, Carter explained, the Quintet was developing a vernacular that Davis would then apply to the original studio material. In this way, Davis would bring the best of both worlds to the recording: the implicit understanding of the familiar and the exciting freshness of the new. Hearing about Davis’ approach to recording “really was a breakthrough conceptual moment for me,” Metheny said.
Judging by the output of Metheny’s many long-standing collaborations—most notably, his four decades of award-winning work with pianist Lyle Mays—one could argue that Metheny is well-schooled in the musical synergisms that develop over time on the bandstand. But a synergistically produced strings album, if it worked, would be breaking new ground.
“That [group connection] is what the core of this album is,” Metheny said. “And to have that morph into this larger thing—I mean, I’ve certainly never done a record like that. And I can’t think of any other record like that. It’s kind of unusual.”
Sánchez, who’s played with most of Metheny’s groups over the course of almost two decades, spoke of how Metheny’s approach to From This Place differed from that of the previous albums they’ve recorded together.
“We all thought it was going to be a quartet record, and then Pat told us that he was hearing something bigger on it,” Sánchez said in a phone interview. “If we had known that there was going to be an orchestra there, we would have completely changed our plan….But since we were recording as a quartet, we were playing exactly the way that we would if we were playing live. Then [Pat had] the brilliant idea to bring in arrangers, who tailored the [orchestrations] to what we played. It was very interesting—I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
Initially, Metheny had planned to write all of the orchestrations himself. It made sense—by the time of the first session, he had already penned the 10 originals, decided what tempos he wanted, and assigned solos, keeping the strengths of each band member in mind. The arrangements were notated in Sibelius, and he was forming notions about what the orchestra could add to his compositions. As always, Metheny was meticulously prepared.
“Whatever people’s perception of my thing is—yes, I do play the guitar—my main gig for 45 years has always been as bandleader, or bandleader-slash-composer. I write 90% or more of the notes that we’re going to play,” he said. “My job has mostly been about finding context for the musicians that I admire to sound great in. For me, it’s been a process of understanding what that is.”
Metheny’s first sketches for the orchestrations “were fine,” he said. “They were kind of straight up and down, right down the middle of what we were playing. Then I thought, ‘I’m missing an opportunity here. There are people who do [orchestrations] 48 out of 52 weeks a year. So why not bring those voices in?’”
In particular, he wanted the voices of Gil Goldstein and Alan Broadbent, two formidable pianists with impressive arranger/sideman credits. Both rose to prominence in the 1990s for their arranging work on high-profile jazz or traditional pop albums, and both went on to win Grammys for their instrumental jazz arrangements. Importantly, both “know how to play rhythm, how to play in time, how to make stuff groove,” Metheny said. In other words, they offered more than mere sweetening.
Metheny divided the tunes to be orchestrated between the two arrangers—keeping one for himself—and assigned Goldstein “America Undefined,” the epic 13-minute composition that would become the opening track. “I gave Gil the super-hard things,” Metheny commented, noting the arranger’s skill in working with rhythmic complexities. “And there’s some really hard music in there.”
Goldstein wouldn’t disagree. “The first piece was the hardest,” he said, speaking by phone from his Long Island home. “I went to [Pat’s] studio in his New York apartment, and when he played it for me I understood absolutely nothing. I couldn’t get what time signature it was in, and the pitches were eluding me. It seemed so sophisticated, I was getting more and more into a panic as the track went on. Then the end part came—that long vamp. It was pretty empty, with just the band, like a trio, not even with Pat in it. It was just a blank canvas.”
To fill that canvas, Goldstein began with a subtle sweep of violins supporting the quartet as the individual players developed Metheny’s engagingly chromatic theme. By mid-tune the orchestra has taken up this theme, now punctuated with electronic reverberation, rattling percussion, distant voices, and clanging bells. Despite the gathering momentum, however, the expected triumphant final cadence never arrives; instead, the instruments stop speaking to each other and scatter, and the musical statement dissolves in a free outro. Undefined, yes—and brilliant.
“Honestly, [making this record] is kind of a dream come true for me,” Goldstein said. Strong praise, given that he and Metheny have played together on scores of projects since they first met as students at the University of Miami in the early 1970s.
“The first three days I was in Florida I heard Jaco Pastorius play at a club in Ft. Lauderdale, and then I heard Pat play in a class on jazz composition,” Goldstein remembered. “My whole experience of the world changed in those three days.”
Upon graduating, Goldstein soon established himself as a successful player in New York, working with the likes of guitarist Pat Martino and saxophonist Lee Konitz, among others, including the up-and-coming Metheny. “Gil was the original piano player in my original band, and I had to decide between him and Lyle (Mays),” Metheny said, referring to The Pat Metheny Group, formed in 1977. “It was a tough decision.”
Goldstein recalls that Metheny had complimented his arranging skills in their early Miami days—a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the turn his career would later take. In 1983 Goldstein joined The Gil Evans Orchestra as its regular pianist, and in that rich musical environment, he started to write for horn sections; before too long he was scoring and arranging for film and television. It was around this time that Metheny, noting Goldstein’s growing success as an arranger, asked if he also wrote for strings, suggesting that Goldstein might orchestrate Secret Stories.
“I stupidly said that I haven’t done so much [with strings], which was the wrong answer,” Goldstein said, ruefully. “He hired the great Jeremy Lubbock to orchestrate it, and I ended up playing those arrangements on tour. But I was always very sad that I reacted with such a bad instinct. So, I’ve always been waiting for this record.”
For the album’s title track, Metheny turned to Broadbent for the arranger’s refined understanding of what strings can do harmonically. “Alan got the tunes that were more in the Nelson Riddle or Leonard Rosenman area,” he said, referring to two of the most prominent orchestrator/composers of the mid-20th century.
Like them, Broadbent is prolific, having created the orchestral settings for dozens of successful albums featuring celebrity pop and jazz singers: Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Natalie Cole, Michael Bublé, Michael Feinstein, Shirley Horn, Sheila Jordan, Diana Krall. But Broadbent also excels at the small group format: for almost three decades he arranged for and played with bassist Charlie Haden’s celebrated Quartet West.
Broadbent borrows from both of these environments for this record. On “From This Place,” for instance, his shimmering symphonic passages augment Meshell Ndegeocello’s pure vocals without subverting the song’s message. Given the weightiness of the lyrics—references to injustice, resistance, despair, hope—anything heavier than the most respectful touch would be too much. But Metheny’s solo on the tune—a forlorn, monochromatic line—is all the more heart-breaking against the color of the orchestra’s swelling harmonies. In this case, Broadbent’s hand masterfully moves the drama of the piece forward.
“Alan and Gil are heroes for me. What they both brought to this, I can’t even say,” Metheny said. “When I got the first demo charts back, I practically started crying. They were just so advanced and so awesome.”
Metheny knew that the charts, based on the live feel of his quartet, needed a particular sound from the orchestra, one that supported the emotional heft of the material. He received some bids from European orchestras; by reputation, European orchestral players, with their exacting approach to a score, are some of the best in the world. But again, Metheny was hearing something different.
“There is willfully a kind of Hollywood component to this album,” observed Metheny. “I have never resisted what I love, and I love that very American film score sound.”
To achieve this sound, Metheny hired the Hollywood Studio Symphony, conducted by Joel McNeely. Recorded on the same Los Angeles sound stage as the soundtrack to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the album’s final tracks thrilled Metheny. “The orchestral days out [in L.A.] were just pure joy,” he said. “It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had as a musician.”
For Metheny, what distinguished the L.A. orchestra from others is not just the players’ technical expertise and their familiarity with American grooves, but also their understanding of the emotional nature of his compositions. “This music is hard, and I really demand an emotional connection [to it] from everyone, including the orchestra,” he said. “The first thing I did at the session was get up and talk to them about what this is.”
Even as bassist Oh admires Metheny’s attention to the merest of details in his music (and seeks to emulate it), she commends the emotive impact of his large-scale vision. “Pat has always been known for writing very cinematic pieces. His music is always about drama, full of emotion,” she said, adding, “I think people need that right now, to be honest. He is such an incredible force of nature.”
The album’s cover displays a dark tornado swirling ominously close to the viewer, an apt symbol for Metheny’s take on the current social climate. He wrote the music for the title tune—the seed thought for the album—the day after the 2016 presidential election, in the early morning hours. From the vantage of the song (with lyrics by writer Alison Riley) the future is uncertain; despite this, the speaker affirms love and freedom as resolute guiding principles. In the relentlessly beautiful sonority that Metheny champions throughout the album, this is the idea that predominates.
“I’ve always been tuned into the forces that form our culture, and these forces absolutely make the new album what it is,” he said. “But years from now, these forces will be incidental to what the record is. I’ve been using this analogy…the diamonds that exist in the world were formed by dirt and all kinds of funk, right? But we don’t remember the dirt and the funk, we only remember the diamond. And in this case, ‘dirt’ is the operative word. There’s a lot of dirt [in the culture] right now….but one of the great things about being a musician is that we’re trading in a currency that’s actually true.”
As an improvisatory musician, he went on, “you must be in the time you’re in. Otherwise [the music] doesn’t have the authenticity, truth, and power that fuels what it sounds like. When I think about my favorite musicians, each one of them has been really of the time that they’re in, creating something that goes way beyond that.”
Take Herbie Hancock, for example. “If you just say ‘Herbie,’ in that name you get a whole sonic world that includes everything about who he is,” Metheny pointed out. “There’s a sound component to it, but how it relates to the larger culture is also interesting.”
Even as he parses the cultural climate of today, Metheny prefers to focus on the timeless nature of music, on that which defies time and place. No amount of rational knowledge about harmonic substitutions, rhythmic displacement, and metric modulation will lead to transcendence on the bandstand, he holds. (Though fluency in these languages might be assumed.) Rather, “it’s the merging of consciousness on this side and the soul on that side. It’s really unknowable,” he said. “But there’s a poetry in that that informs every aspect of our humanity.”
Shortly after the album’s Feb. 21 release, Metheny’s quartet will embark upon a three-continent tour. They’ll hit some shores they haven’t yet visited as a band—Cuba and Oh’s native Australia. If they play from the new album, though, it will be without strings: it’s too expensive to jet an orchestra around the world, and the music is too tough for a regional orchestra to pick up quickly. Metheny doubts that he’ll ever be able to mount a tour for From This Place.
But he’ll be traveling abroad for a large part of the year with his different ensembles, each with its own ethos. After the Evening With tour, he’ll visit Europe with his Side-Eye trio, a showcase for young talents, this time with the pianist James Francies and drummer Marcus Gilmore.
And “[Ron Carter and I] are still going to do more gigs. It’s great playing with Ron,” he said. “If I had to pick 20 all-time favorite records, he’s on 12 or 13 of them—and not just the Miles stuff. But we get to hang out a lot when we’re traveling, and he’s very happy to talk about his memories of things.”
For Metheny, those memories stand out as diamonds in the funk.
(Reprinted from the March 2020 issue of Downbeat magazine.)