Saturday April 14

Pat Metheny (in photo) is arguably America’s best-known and most prolific jazz guitarist. He has worked in a multitude of settings and styles. He’s played with Jaco Pastorious, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, Chick Corea and many more.  He’s made 43 albums and won 16 Grammys. And yet …
      “I envy the people that can make a big pile of their awards and sit back in their chair and reflect on their accomplishments and get a kick out of the money they’ve made,” says Metheny, on the phone from New York. “Unfortunately, I don’t have the capacity to do any of those things. I get no satisfaction out of it whatsoever.”
       For Metheny, 52, it’s all about the “pursuit,” of finding “musical solutions.”
     “To me,” Metheny continues, “the musical dialect that I have inhabited for the last 35 years or whatever, is actually quite a small community of people. I’d almost characterize it as a tribe that is interested in a certain area of harmony, and a certain way of improvising. They have a particular sense of jazz history. They know what needs to happen in order for it to progress and also stay true to the actual roots of what jazz is.”
       That, Metheny says, is keeping “a connection to the actual culture we’re living in, as opposed to constantly referencing other moments in our culture.”
    It was this way of thinking that brought Metheny together with pianist Brad Melhau, with whom he’s just released a second CD, “Quartet.” Their first album, released last fall, was done primarily as a duo. They play with the other guys Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard Saturday April 14 at the Opera House.

    “ When I heard Brad,” says Metheny, “I immediately recognized there was a new member of the tribe.” They shared “the nuts and bolts of music itself: melodic development, a certain senses of harmony encompassing all 12 notes all the time, a certain rhythmic feeling.”
     “I’ve been a big fan of Pat’s since I was 13-years-old,” says Melhau, in a separate e-mail interview from Amsterdam. “I love his sense of harmony, the emotional immediacy of his music, the intensity of his playing and the way he writes for an ensemble.”
      Metheny says that with Melhau, he may be playing the same role older musicians like Jack DeJohnette and Gary Burton played for him when he was younger. For his part, Melhau, 36, says, “I really feel no generational difference. He’s simply a very hip, up-to-date person in all aspects.’’
     They crossed paths many years ago. “There’s a common way that musicians often close their conversation,” says Metheny. “Like regular civilians say, “Let’s have dinner.’ The musician version is ‘We should play some time.’ Whenever we said that, we’d lock eyes like ‘We really should play together. We have some stuff to talk about.’ That was an unspoken thing between us for a number of years.” In the summer of 2005, they met in Europe and booked studio time in December.
      “Quartet” features bassist, Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard, both of whom will join Metheny and Malhau on a U.S. tour beginning Wednesday in Mesa, Arizona. Melhau says they led the album off with “A Night Away” because Grenadier and Ballard are “grooving so hard. It gives the message that this record, in contrast to the first one Pat and I released, is much more about a group of four musicians together. The duo tracks are important as well, though, and they offer a sonic release, perhaps, from the quartet. The record has an arc that winds up becoming more calm, but also maybe more poignant towards the end.”
      Jazz people talk about the “risk” of putting piano and guitar together. “It’s somewhat of a challenging environment,” says Metheny, “as both instruments are capable of playing chords. Therefore, one of two things has to happen: You have to agree beforehand on every single voicing so you don’t clash, or you have to be really good listeners. In this case, there was a little bit of the first, but mostly the second. Neither one of us are thinking in terms of guitar/piano – we’re thinking orchestration, the details of harmony. We share one very strong sensibility as improvisers – a narrative storytelling thing. The idea is to move the plot along.”
    “Basically, what it means,” says Melhau, “is playing less at any given moment, and finding the most important notes to play. By playing less, in a very cool way, you wind up playing things you’ve never played before.”
     Can music surpass words? “As much as I admire and enjoy language,” says Metheny, “the nature of the description you can offer through music is transcendent, relative to the earthbound quality of words. The temperature that words function is at a much cooler temperature than music.”

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