American academic Bob Gluck has previously done trenchant guides to the work of Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis and now comes at the music of guitarist Pat Metheny. A professor emeritus at the University of Albany, Gluck is also a musician whose quartet once played music associated with Hancock’s Mwandishi band, about which he’s written. He also experimented with Metheny charts in various musical settings. The method – studying the music by playing it – led to enough understanding for an attempt at authoritative, if sometimes forensic, exegesis. Metheny himself helped to illuminate obscure areas. The project was personal, too: Metheny’s first solo acoustic album, One Quiet Night (2003) provided consolation following the start of health problems suffered by Gluck’s father.
The word “stories” in the book’s subtitle recognises Metheny’s view that form should support narrative. The album Bright Size Life was a template for this. For him, “story” isn’t a plot line but a metaphor for the dynamic unfolding of a musical work. Sometimes, the music actually features a voice, but it doesn’t need to utter words and sentences. “Metheny understood”, Gluck writes, “that the voice could add a unique depth of expression to his music, even on its rapid, angular melodic lines.” The role of wordless singers began when Brazilian vocalist and percussionist Nana Vasconcelos joined the band.
One might say, jokingly, that Pat Metheny is, if not unique among, then more unique than other modern jazz guitarists. His sound and temperament, with its ensemble clothing – pre-eminently in the Pat Metheny Group – would never detain for long a musician submitting to one of those blindfold tests. “Sweet, soulful, and lyrical” is how Mike Stern described Metheny’s touch. Gluck says that Metheny’s “dialect” draws on culturally diverse sources and that, like kindred musicians avoiding the pigeon-hole, his music occupies the spaces between classifications – being neither jazz nor rock, for instance, though jazzers would claim him more than rockers might. The narrative element is echoed in what Metheny has to say about the conception of music – that it’s based on personal beliefs and experiences – and that the logic of solos relies on the build-up and release of tension and the sustaining of melodic interest.
Gluck misses nothing that might contribute to an understanding of Metheny as man and musician, from biography to issues of genre and race and the guitarist’s intuitive employment of motifs. He cites influences such as Wes Montgomery, Gary Burton and Sonny Rollins and chronicles the creation of the PM Group and the nature of its distinctive sound, its collectivity and its combined compositional credits. He provides illuminating musical examples. It’s interesting that when looking for someone to occupy the keyboard chair – Lyle Mays got the job – Metheny considered Gil Goldstein, Alan Broadbent and Andy LaVerne, each with “the chops and imagination” to use keyboards orchestrally.
The book reflects on the group’s achievements, particularly The Way Up of 2005, its “most expansive” album in pushing form and core meaning to reflect structures of classical music and recall Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus. There’s an exhaustive analysis. The chapter Remarkable Sounds incorporates consideration of Metheny’s Manzer guitars, the Roland guitar synthesiser, and the Metheny-commissioned 42-string Pikasso of 1984. The Roland is considered with specific reference to Rejoicing, a trio album with Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, both Ornette Coleman associates, and Endangered Species (1986), a chart from the Song X album with Coleman himself, Haden, Jack DeJohnette and Coleman’s drummer son, Denardo.
Gluck’s not without the academic’s tendency to deck the obvious with polysyllables. His conclusion that Metheny’s “composition and improvisation each represent (sic) a broad canvas within which one engages a panoply of features, among them sonic, melodic, dynamic, juxtapositional and temporal” might be applied to any exceptional musician, of which jazz supplies plenty. In typical academic style he’s also meticulous in attribution, the book’s notes running to 27 pages, including a 10-page bibliography as well as a tailored discography and a complete index. However, all of this might be seen as contributing to his book’s magisterial sweep.
It’s trite to assert that academics make one think about music and all its ramifications while the music itself, as if separate from any thought given to it, stimulates mainly feeling. Stern’s “sweet, soulful and lyrical” description of Metheny’s sums that up. But the vast areas of Metheny endeavour Gluck covers and uncovers only go to indicate how much thought arises from initial feeling, because without a profound feeling for Metheny’s music it would have been impossible to think deeply about it – and write this thoroughgoing survey.
Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words, by Bob Gluck. University of Chicago Press, pb, 198pp, £17.65. ISBN 978-0-226-83445-0
