Pat: Metheny

 

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The term “record label” has almost become irrelevant. As we consume more and more of our music in digital format, record labels as such have become more or less invisible or irrelevant to the consumer. Not so 50 years back. Musicians we both tied to and touted by the labels. If you were purchasing music in the 60s and 70s, you knew what to expect from a Tamla, an Atco, a Polydor. You knew what you were likely to get if the label was ECM.

I knew ECM was European, north European. I knew it was independent. I knew it meant progressive Jazz. I didn’t know it was short for Edition of Contemporary Music. I knew the label included among its artists Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Eberhard Weber, Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie because I no small part of my LP collection included them. My collection also included a bit of Pat Metheny.

I tend to skew more toward the guitar than piano or sax, and a number of the above fit my prefs. Although Metheny started out solo (supported by some of the ECM crowd), he is mostly associated with the self-named Pat Metheny Group, which was releasing records up until about 10 years ago. He released an album titles From This Place about a year ago, and then Road to the Sun a couple of weeks ago (March 2021). And speaking of record labels, it caught my attention that most recently, his music has been appearing on the Nonesuch label, which I knew as a kid because a lot of my parents’ classical collection was on that label (a budget classical label in the 60s that has :developed into a label that records critically acclaimed music from a wide variety of genres” –Wikipedia)

 

Mar* Songs: Forward March

Pat Metheny Group: Forward March
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It took me a while to adjust to studying in college, because it was different from what I did in high school. The material was significantly more complex, there was much more of it, and my fellow students were almost uniformly incredibly smart. But one thing that was basically the same was that studying was a solitary act.

Law school, though, was another thing altogether. Heading into it, though, I had no idea that I needed a new approach, and fully expected that I’d continue in my accustomed manner. However, early in my first year, I was approached by a friend, who somehow knew that creating a study group was critical to success. And I’m so glad that I did. In some ways, the first year law experience, at least at Fordham Law School in 1983, was remarkably more like an elementary school or middle school experience than college. We were divided up into sections, alphabetically, and were given a set schedule, with no electives. All of my classes were with some combination of other sections, all of which were filled with classmates whose last name was from the first half of the alphabet, except for one class that was just for my section. Therefore, I didn’t really get to know anyone in the second half of the alphabet until second year, and was closest to the people in my section.

This sort of rigid scheduling was ideal for study groups, because we were all taking the same classes. And I quickly found that studying with Dave, A.J. and Bob was not only helpful in digesting and understanding the enormous mass of material that they throw at you first year, but they became my closest friends. We would meet periodically, order some sort of takeout (because we were in New York, and the choices were myriad), discuss our work, and, of course, other stuff. Sometime during second semester, Bob fell off the radar, distracted by his ultimate lack of interest in becoming a lawyer and the ready availability of college hoops at Madison Square Garden, but the rest of us continued to work together. As we approached our finals, we prepared outlines, quizzed each other, and pushed each other hard, while also becoming life-long friends.

I have a strong memory of showing up at a study group session at Dave’s apartment with a new copy of the Pat Metheny Group’s First Circle album—and by album, I mean a large slab of black vinyl.  I’m pretty sure that I picked it up, discounted, at the Warner Entertainment company store. After graduating from college, I worked at Atlantic Records for the summer of 1982, which granted me access to the discounted records, books and other items that were in the employee-only store in the basement of 75 Rockefeller Plaza. By continuing to visit the store periodically even after my employment ended, I remained a familiar face to the security guards who still let me pass into the inner sanctum for a few years.

Metheny had been a favorite of mine since I was introduced to him at WPRB, and I’ve written about him a few times here. I know that Dave, who played the guitar, was a fan (I don’t remember whether the others were, too). So, it was natural that when I showed up with the new album, in February, 1984, I would put it on Dave’s turntable, and that we were excited to hear it.

And on came “Forward March.” It was, and remains, a bit of a headscratcher. A dissonant, ragged march-like song, which eventually turns somewhat less weird, but never really sounding “perfect.” Sort of like the Portsmouth Sinfonia, or even the first rehearsal of an average high school marching band. Allmusic suggests that it might be a parody “directed at a few silly skirmishes of the day (Grenada? the Falklands?).” Another blogger considered the fact that the band opened concerts on its tour with the oddity as showing that:

While the Pat Metheny Group are all serious musicians, this was no hardcore jazz purists’ band. They want to entertain you. They want you to smile (I’ve never seen a musician look as happy as Metheny does). For all its novelty, “Forward March” made its audience smile right from the word go.

But it seems that may well just be overthinking it. Metheny himself, in response to a fan question about the inspiration for “Forward March,” stated that the song is:

really just sound - there was a thing i was messing with with [sic] a new instrument for me at the time, the synclavier, where it was possible to scale the range of the guitar by large amounts - meaning that what would normally be read as an octave could be read as several octaves and the 12 notes in between that same octave were scaled along with the octaves into 12, but now across several octaves, thereby making an "octave ratio" larger than 1:1. this was fascinating to me at the time, and that piece was one of several that came from it. the only one that was recorded. 

I’m really not sure how that really explains “Forward March,” but hey, Pat has never lied to me.

Anyway, the next song on the album is “Yolanda, You Learn,” a much more typical Metheny song. I’m sure that we listened for a while, then got down to studying whatever subject was on the docket, and maybe more importantly, eating whatever food was on the menu.

After first year, we were allowed to take electives, so the three of us weren’t always in the same classes—but when we were, we reconvened the group, and still remain good friends more than three decades later.

Sinking & Falling: Free Fall

Dixie Dregs: Free Fall
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One of my minor pleasures is when I get to write about a band that I like, but which has never been featured here. The Dixie Dregs fit that bill. And speaking of Bill, the only time I saw the Dregs was, inexplicably, in a dive bar in Kingston, New Jersey in August, 1981, with some fellow WPRB staffers, including my friend Bill Rosenblatt. (Inexplicably, because setlist.fm shows that a couple of months before that show, they played Pier 84 in New York, a fairly large venue, the night after playing the Mann Music Center in Philadelphia, another large venue, and a couple of weeks later, they played the Lakeland, Florida, Civic Center, which holds 8,000 people.)

My memory of that show is basically limited to the fact that they were incredible, especially in a place the size of a large living room, and that I was able to talk with them, go “backstage” (the kitchen, if I remember) and drink their beer. Bill’s more detailed memories of the evening can be found here. We did promote some other shows at the Tin Lizzie, but this was the only “big name” that I remember being there (although the Internet has evidence that Jorma Kaukonen played there about a year later, after I graduated).

It is also fun to be able to follow my first post in this theme, about a ska-punk song, with a sunny, fusion song. The Dixie Dregs were one of the best fusion bands of the 70s and early 80s, and as is my habit when someone else has written something better than I could, I’ll quote Rosenblatt:

The Dixie Dregs were a band from Georgia that played jazzy instrumental rock in a style that sounded sort of like Kansas without the vocals, or Lynyrd Skynyrd meets Mahavishnu Orchestra.. . .Their leader was guitar virtuoso Steve Morse, who would later join Kansas and Deep Purple when those bands reached their “playing the zoo” stages. 

Although they were mostly from Georgia, they really came together as a band at the University of Miami, at a time when musicians such as Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny (and future members of his band, Dan Gottlieb and Mark Egan) and Bruce Hornsby were studying and/or teaching there. After self-releasing an album of demos, they were signed by Capricorn Records, the Allman Brothers’ label, and released their first official album, Free Fall. The title track, which leads off the album, is a good example of their music—generally upbeat, complex but not annoyingly complicated, impeccably played, and with a southern twang. And no vocals (until an early 1980s bad experiment with guest vocalists…..). I found a review of the album that refers to the song as "a jazz-country-funk breakdown with a digital synth alien laser beam effect solo, whilst a footstompingly good delay-drenched electric violin follows up with a pentatonic jam." 

The Dixie Dregs (briefly officially shortened to The Dregs late in the game) continued to release a string of similarly excellent albums, despite some turnover in personnel, until 1982, without much commercial success despite critical acclaim and a few Grammy nominations. Because instrumentals are a hard sell anyway, and certainly during the 80s. There were a few reunions in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but basically, the band has been quiet. Until now—a tour of the Free Fall lineup has been scheduled, and it doesn’t look like they are playing any place like the Tin Lizzie.

In Memoriam: Naná Vasconcelos

Pat Metheny Group: Are You Going With Me (live)
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As we all know, 2016 seems to have been the worst year ever for high profile losses in the musical world (and the acting world, and the writing world….). Chuck Prophet released a song from his forthcoming album called “Bad Year For Rock and Roll,” and who would disagree? Every year here at SMM, we look at some of those who we lost this year, the famous, the lesser known, and some in between.

In March, Naná Vasconcelos died of lung cancer in Brazil. Vasconcelos was an incredible musician, and although he was a vocalist and performed on a number of different Brazilian instruments, including the berimbau, he became renowned as a percussionist. As a bad drummer myself, I recognize that percussion is often where you stick the bad musicians, and in my days in the Princeton Band, we had a large “trash percussion” section, which was the home for a bunch of people who wanted to be in the band, but who didn’t actually play an instrument. But much like how right field is where you put the bad baseball player in Little League, while in the majors, right fielders are often stars (like, you know, Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron), Vasconcelos was an all-star percussionist. (Question—is that metaphor too attenuated?). Vasconcelos played with many great jazz and Brazilian artists, as well as some titans of rock while also releasing a number of albums as a leader.

I first became aware of Vasconcelos when he collaborated with Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays on As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls, and then became a member of the Pat Metheny Group. (I know that this is the third Pat Metheny related post that I have written this year (all since September), but I went a whole bunch of years without writing about him, so just bear with me).

As I have previously mentioned, my strongest memory of Vasconcelos was when he deservedly embarrassed me. In 1981, I got to see the Pat Metheny Group, with Vasconcelos, at Princeton, in venerable Alexander Hall. If I recall correctly, the band was to play two sets, and I arranged to interview Metheny between sets for WPRB. Unfortunately, I couldn’t arrange to get in for free, so I paid for the first show, did my interview, and simply never left, allowing me to see the second set.

I remember seeing Vasconcelos playing a strange instrument that appeared to be a gourd, with a long neck and a metal string, played with a bow (see the picture above). I had no clue what it was, and because the Internet wasn’t invented yet, I couldn’t Google it. After the first show, I went into the bowels of Alexander Hall to interview Metheny, who couldn’t have been nicer, and at some point approached Vasconcelos. With the arrogance and ignorance of youth, I asked him, “What was that thing that you were playing?” He looked at me with disgust, and with disdain in his voice, he replied, “that musical instrument is a berimbau.” I immediately realized that I had insulted him, and probably his culture, with my question, mumbled a response and fled. As you can see here, he was truly a master of the berimbau. And I was an idiot.

The lesson that I learned that day, and which I have tried to follow since, is that if you are unprepared, you will get embarrassed. And while that wasn’t the last time that happened to me (unfortunately), it hasn’t happened all that often.

One of the highlights of that show was their performance of “Are You Going With Me,” a song with a strong samba feel which must have been influenced by Vasconcelos. The song, which is often referred to as a “fusion ballad” builds from a quiet start to an intense climax, and the crew had rigged lights so that Alexander Hall’s stained glass windows gradually lit up as the song built, a relatively subtle and clever way of tying the visuals to the sound.

The version above is from Travels, a live album recorded in 1982 at a number of venues, so it is likely be pretty close to what I heard that night in 1981.

Politics: This Is Not America

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Just a short contribution, in light of Tuesday’s shocking election result. I’ll try to have something more substantial on the debacle over at Another Old Guy in a few days. (Here it is!)

My first thought when I heard the final result was that this was not the America that I knew, and that turned to nauseous feeling when I realized that half of this country sees America in a very different way than me—where division, hate, misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, bullying, greed and egotism are glorified. And I was pissed.

Here’s what my America is:

we believe that the American dream is big enough for everyone — for people of all races and religions, for men and women, for immigrants, for LGBT people, and people with disabilities. For everyone. . . .

I count my blessings every single day that I am an American. And I still believe as deeply as I ever have that if we stand together and work together with respect for our differences, strength in our convictions and love for this nation, our best days are still ahead of us.

Because, you know — you know, I believe we are stronger together and we will go forward together. And you should never, ever regret fighting for that. You know, scripture tells us, “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season, we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”

So my friends, let us have faith in each other, let us not grow weary, let us not lose heart, for there are more seasons to come. And there is more work to do.

That was from the concession speech delivered by Hillary Clinton, the one candidate who was qualified, both by experience and temperament, to lead America, the candidate who, as I write this, got more votes than the President Elect, and who would have made a damn fine President. And someone who, at least publicly, is a lot more gracious than I feel right now.

 I’d like to hope that what has happened over the last year is not America. But I’m just not sure anymore.

The Number 9/September: September Fifteenth

Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays: September Fifteenth
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In 1981, after my junior year in college, I went to Europe with my two roommates, Jon, who was also a junior, and Neal, who had just graduated. We flew into Brussels and had open tickets home from London, and a Eurailpass. We had very little pre-planned, in the pre-Internet, pre-cell phone era, so every day was an adventure as we had to figure out what we were going to do, where we were going to stay, where we were going to eat and how and where we were going to travel. As best I can recall, our major information source was a book called “Let’s Go: Europe,” which was at the time, considered to be the best source for student (read: “cheap”) travel, and we used it, despite its Harvard roots. (In researching this article, I found out that the Let’s Go organization was founded by Oliver Koppell, who became a well-known New York politician and lawyer, and an early business manager was Andrew Tobias, who became a prominent writer.)

This lack of planning and lack of options like Google and Yelp resulted in lots of serendipity. We stumbled upon a rustic street fair in Lucerne, fireworks in Paris, a free Gil Evans Orchestra concert in, I believe, Florence, and had many other adventures. We mostly stayed in cheap hotels, filled with other students who wanted a bit more privacy and flexibility than youth hostels, although we did stay in one very nice hostel in Switzerland.

Another vestige of the era was that wherever we went, there were actual record stores, and I would occasionally break away from my friends, who were not nearly as obsessed with music as I was, to paw through their wares, looking for things I couldn’t find in the U.S. I did bring back one LP, Sky’s debut, which somehow survived the trip. But one thing that was somewhat strange to me was that many record stores allowed you to listen to new records to sample them before, the store presumably hoped, you would buy them. I remember walking into a store, I think in Switzerland, and seeing the new Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays album, with the unusual title, As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls. I had no idea what to expect—I was familiar with Metheny’s solo work, and his great albums with the Pat Metheny Group, which featured Mays on keyboards—but why was this album credited only to the two of them?

Luckily, I was able to ask to hear the album. The title track is a long, side-length piece that was at times atmospheric, and at others it was filled with driving percussion—sort of a mix between jazz, rock, Latin and ambient music. Of course, I didn’t get to hear the whole thing—they skipped ahead to move things along. I don’t specifically recall my reaction to our featured song, "September Fifteenth," but I know that I got the album after I returned home from our trip (which was shortened by the air traffic controller’s strike that led to President Reagan destroying the union, and which forced us to scramble to get ourselves home), and I listened to it often.  I got the chance to hear The Pat Metheny Group at Princeton later that year, and while I do not recall whether they played this song (they probably didn't, based on setlists from other shows from the same time), I do still remember being embarrassed by percussionist Nana Vasconcelos when I asked him a dumb question between sets.

"September Fifteenth" is, simply, a beautiful song. It is dedicated to Bill Evans, the great piano player, who died on that date while the album was being recorded.  Evans, who cut his teeth playing with Miles Davis before beginning a distinguished career as a leader of his own groups, was an influence on both Metheny and Mays. For the most part, the song is a guitar and piano duet, with some synthesizer, mostly at the beginning. You can hear how Metheny and Mays pay tribute to Evans, if you compare "September Fifteenth" to Evans’ own work with guitarist Jim Hall, who was also a huge influence on (and ultimately a collaborator with) Metheny:



Pat Metheny is one of the biggest stars in jazz—he tours and records often, with various groups, exploring different styles of music, both inside and outside the jazz world. As I was writing this piece, I started to wonder, where the hell was Lyle Mays? And to be honest, it isn’t easy to find out much about his recent life. His last album with Metheny was released back in 2005 and his last solo album was released five years before that. The most recent thing that I was able to locate from Mays is this video from 2011, recorded at the TEDxCaltech conference.



It appears to be an attempt to meld three of Mays’ loves—music, technology and math. As Mays says in this article:

What do you get when the IT Department is the band? Jimmy Branly (drums) is a recording engineer. Andrew Pask (woodwinds) is a programmer who works for Cycling 74 (the company which makes the brilliant MAX software), Bob Rice (guitar and sounds) is a sound designer/engineer/synth programmer, Tom Warrington (bass) is a math wiz, Jon 9 (visualizations) designs, builds, and provides content for video installations, and Rich Breen could build (and nearly has built) recording studios MacGyver style. And what kind of music should one make when Stephen Hawking is in the audience at CalTech? Jazz alone doesn’t cut it.

Read the article if you want to know more, because I cannot even attempt to summarize what is going on. But the music still sounds good, and it is therefore a bit sad that Mays isn’t out there more, playing and recording music.