Pat Metheny interview: “The central vibe of this record is one of resonant contemplation, and this guitar allows me to go deep”

Pat Metheny has lowered the tone. For the last 20 years or so, he has been probing deeper and deeper into the mysteries and idiosyncrasies of the baritone guitar, which in the scheme of things is between a regular guitar and bass guitar.

He first pulled the instrument out of the closet on the solo One Quiet Night (2003) and followed it up with What’s It All About (2011). Both were purely solo albums, no overdubs, and both won Grammy Awards. His latest solo album, MoonDial (BMG), again features the baritone guitar, but uses a custom- built model made especially for him by Linda Manzer, one of the world’s premier luthiers.

Released in July, it features on his current European tour; and we'll get the chance to see and hear it for ourselves in November, when he plays two nights at the EFG London Jazz Festival (15 and 16 November), and dates in Birmingham (14 Nov) and Cambridge (17 Nov).

Initially, Metheny struggled to find the right nylon strings for the new custom made guitar that were viable for the special tuning he used. When he did locate some suitable strings, he was so taken by their sound and resonance he did something he had never done before – he conceived an album while dealing with the demands of a tour and went ahead and booked studio time to record MoonDial during the mid-tour break last December:“I wanted to capture things while they were fresh and exciting.”

During the 50 remaining tour dates, he gradually introduced his new nylon-strung baritone guitar to the audiences. At first he included one tune on the instrument during a concert, then two, three and gradually by the time the tour’s first half had ended, it took up about 30 minutes of his solo concerts.

“It’s a beautiful rich, almost infinite feeling and was a new world for me,” he says. “Somehow there was something about this instrument where I could now really zero in on things – in terms of touch, in terms of sound, in terms of harmony and terms of melody”.

“Even though I had Linda make me an instrument, I could never get it to sound right,” continues Metheny. “Then literally two days before my Dream Box tour started [last year], I happened to hear about this company in Argentina that was making nylon strings which would allow very high and very low pitches to occur on a normal scale guitar, so I ordered some from Amazon, and they came the day before the tour.”

Immediately Metheny put on the new strings and, “Suddenly I could do all this stuff that I would never have thought about doing with a steel string baritone, it’s almost like a different instrument. The idea is to keep coming up with different angles and ways of thinking about music."

He tunes the middle two strings of the baritone guitar up an octave, while the tuning of the other four strings remains a fourth or fifth below that of a regular guitar. Effectively, this meant re-learning completely new finger positions, and if completely learning the ins, outs and idiosyncrasies of a new instrument might be regarded as a challenge, especially as Metheny just celebrated his 70th birthday in August, then bear in mind this is the guy who came up with the Orchestrion project (where he developed a guitar that could be used to trigger sounds from some 150 elaborate, custom made, MIDI-triggered, solenoid driven mechanical instruments he designed which allowed him to compose and perform as a one-person orchestra).

It's documented on Orchestrion (2010): “I would say that project was an incredibly fertile environment,” he reflects. “Even 15 years later I am really shocked that nobody else has gotten there – it’s still something I feel has got a lot of potential.”

But at the moment, it is the baritone guitar that’s Metheny’s consuming interest as he gains total mastery over the instrument, which includes artfully navigating around the shortcomings of the instrument in a way that makes them sound non-existent.

“I cannot think about the baritone as a traditional guitar at all,’ he explains. “The best way I can describe it is it’s like you’ve got three two-stringed instruments which are right next to each other. The top two strings are like a viola, the middle two strings are like a violin, and the bottom two strings are like a cello, and you really have to think about each of those sections sort of having their own internal world in terms of voice leading and so forth – there’s a bunch of stuff in there that once I really understood it, which was in that period between One Quiet Night and What’s It All About, it became even more fascinating.”

The solo MoonDial, recorded in December 2023, is the logical continuum of One Quiet Night and What’s It All About, extending the sound palette of the steel stringed baritone with the range made possible by the custom-made nylon strung baritone model. The firm, resonant sound quality of the lower notes alone are enough to suggest what sparked Metheny’s enthusiasm, while the upper notes are clarion clear and precise. Featuring 13 tracks, including a brief reprise of the title track at the end, there is a sense that each song has been chosen (and its key selected) to enable the unique characteristics of the baritone guitar to be shown to best advantage.

The overall feel of the album is what Metheny describes as “hard core mellow”, a surprisingly apt description of the late night feel that is the guiding aesthetic of the music. If the best music somehow finds a function in our lives, then the midnight hours are the time when MoonDial comes into its own: “I have often found myself as a listener searching for music to fill those hours,” says Metheny. “The central vibe of this record is one of resonant contemplation, and this guitar allows me to go deep.”

Although there have been Metheny solo guitar projects since 1979’s New Chautauqua and intermittently since, taking in the avant garde inspired Zero Tolerance For Silence in 1994, it seems that during the post-Covid years Metheny’s interest in both solo recordings and solo tours has increased. So what prompted this?

“Well, in the past, people have asked if I would do ‘a solo concert,’ even back in the ECM days," he answers. "In fact I even did one somewhere in there, as part of some ECM festival, and it was like, ‘I have no idea what I am even going to do,’ and I think I played – there was a tune on Watercolours called ‘Ice Fire,’ which was a 12-string tuning thing – that went on for 10 minutes and that was my ‘solo concert’ back then.”

Today, Metheny’s repertoire ranges a lot more widely, from originals to quality standards, gradually accumulated for their adaptability to the baritone guitar: “I would experiment with tunes that I loved and liked – ‘Okay, this one is great, and this one works well in that key,’ and I would kind of catalogue these things and by the time I had a list of maybe 35 or 40 tunes that I had been playing in sound checks and after the gig, suddenly I could add a new section to the evening performance that was sonically different from everything else.”

Metheny’s solo concert philosophy dates back to the 1970s when he was a member of vibes virtuoso Gary Burton’s group.

“It is really built around a very singular thing, which was that for three years I would walk offstage for eight minutes each night and Gary would play, usually Jobim’s ‘Chega du Saudade,’ solo," he recalls. "And it was just awe-inspiring, especially on the vibes, which was one of the most unforgiving instruments possible, and to me it was like, ‘Man that is really…’; I mean to this day, that’s it, that’s the standard. And invitations would come, 'Would you do a solo concert?’ – and I thought, ‘If I ever do a solo concert, at the very least I want it to be something really different,’ and that led me to the Orchestrion project. At first it was going to be a couple of little things, and it ended up being 150 mechanical instruments of different kinds that also proved once and for all, if there'd been any doubt, just how weird I actually am. That was my choice and if nothing else it was certainly different, and also I would say, a very valuable personal lesson.

Metheny with the mighty Orchestrion

“But then I thought I have done a bunch of these solo records, each one is pretty different, New Chautauqua, Orchestrion, Zero Tolerance and the baritone guitar records came along and I thought a couple of years ago, before Covid, I should try [solo concerts]. I should able to do this, it should be good. So I had the guys who do our bookings find me like six really remote locations in northern New England, and I did it, six concerts, thinking I had this idea of what I might do, and it was okay. I wasn’t as good as I hoped, but it also made me think, ‘Well, I guess if I did this more I would get a lot better at it.’ Then Covid happened, and everything that was supposed to happen in those years got pushed back and then there was the Dream Box album of last year, which seemed like it set up a perfect environment to try doing more solo gigs.”

But more solo gigs meant the inclusion of more standards to keep things fresh, so how does he feel about returning to the standards repertoire, which is where it all began when he first picked up the guitar as a teenager?

“Well, it’s my default, in a lot of ways,” he reflects. “I used to sit around and play ‘Autumn Leaves’ all day long, I have to kind of switch myself off so not to just do that, that’s what I started doing, it was my Gibson 175 and amp playing with good musicians, playing these tunes, that’s the root of everything for me, and always has been. I have rarely done that on records though, even though that’s the foundation of everything for me, I think part of that is standards seemed to me to be part of the job description as I understood it early on.

“The other part of the job description, for me back then, as now, was that idea of looking to find your own place in music – I did an interview recently with these guys doing a film on John Scofield, whom I love, I don’t even know if they used it, but it occurred to me while we were talking, and I’m talking about John, I said, ‘John and I are both in the infinity business, and by that I meant it’s sorta like he has infinity John Scofield, it doesn’t matter the tune or setting, he’s got infinity on that, like Gary Burton, Ornette, Joe Henderson. The musicians that I like the most are musicians that have a kinda ‘who they are’ aesthetic open to a wide, wide, wide range of settings and always retain that sense.

Metheny with his Linda Manzer-built 42-string Pikasso guitar

“To me, that’s an up and down thing as opposed to the going wider thing, which also maybe is included with some musicians – I would say there is a group of musicians which I have been very lucky to be associated with in the past, Chick, Herbie, Gary Burton, Jack DeJohnette, an era of musicians who have a really broad interest in music that is based on a pretty advanced level of musicianship. That kind of means – and I am going to include myself in that group for the purposes of this discussion – we could go and play with the New York Philharmonic tomorrow, and the next day play with Beyoncé and we wouldn’t get fired from either one; we could play free with no changes at all, or we could play deep inside the hardest possible changes, the thing includes all those possibilities and more and that’s the rub – they really understand the implications of what Trane was doing harmonically. I mean that’s like nuclear physics. Basically, you’ve got a 10-year thing [that] you’re going to have to go through to at least approach being fluent within that realm.

“I think all of this relates to this sense of the fan that lives inside you which also has this sense of infinity, I’m sure you’re like it too, you don’t have enough hours in the day to listen to all the music you love. I think most musicians begin like that, start out as being a fan, and in my case yes, I started out being a fan and included in that was wanting to understand, and that’s still what it is for me. I just want to understand the stuff I really love, and as I went through that process of understanding, the potential of participation increased and eventually you get to the point of wanting to hang out with some of the other people who are also like that, and in that sense I have been extremely lucky, since right from the beginning, I have been around so many great musicians with that same aspiration.”

Pat Metheny plays the Barbican on 15 and 16 November as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival: efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk

MoonDial is out now on BMG/Modern Recordings

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today