Pat Metheny is featured in the Guardian's series 50 Great Moments in Jazz History, which examines Metheny's many contributions to his craft through his virtuosic playing, genre-defying collaborations, high-tech experimentation, and more. "Metheny is that rare jazz musician who combines a pop-composer's instinct for an anthemic melody with a virtuoso ability to play extended spontaneous solos without repeating himself," says the Guardian. "More than any other jazz guitarist of the post-bop era, Pat Metheny has given the instrument as natural and prominent a place in jazz as a trumpet or a saxophone."
Pat Metheny is featured as the latest entry in the Guardian's series 50 Great Moments in Jazz History. In the piece, the Guardian's John Fordham examines Metheny's many contributions to his craft through his virtuosic playing, genre-defying collaborations, high-tech experimentation, and much more.
"Metheny is that rare jazz musician who combines a pop-composer's instinct for an anthemic melody with a virtuoso ability to play extended spontaneous solos without repeating himself," Fordham writes. Throughout his career, Metheny has "successfully balanced parallel lives—maintaining and developing the popular appeal of the Pat Metheny Group, while forming ad hoc partnerships with some of the most powerful improvisers in jazz, including fellow guitarists Jim Hall and John Scofield, saxophonists Michael Brecker and Joshua Redman, and many others."
Fordham cites one influence and collaboration in particular that proves illustrative of Metheny's wide-ranging talents. "Perhaps one of the most intriguing apparent contradictions of his complex and restlessly curious musical sensibility is the devotion of this pop-savvy tunesmith to the impulsive and freewheeling music of Ornette Coleman," Fordham writes. "More than any other, this might be the quality that has sustained his jazz-playing edge, and given his career such longevity and diversity." (Metheny and Coleman came together in 1985 to record Song X, which Newsweek described as "a joint triumph" and "Metheny's most stunning album." It was reissued by Nonesuch in 2005 on the 20th anniversary of its release.)
"More than any other jazz guitarist of the post-bop era," Fordham concludes, "Pat Metheny has given the instrument as natural and prominent a place in jazz as a trumpet or a saxophone."
Read the complete article at guardian.co.uk.
As noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal, Metheny will tour the US and Europe this fall and is a featured presenter at the EG Conference on innovation tomorrow in Monterey, California, where he will discuss his Orchestrion project. For more information, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.
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