‘Omne trium perfectum’.
That’s a Latin phrase for everything that comes in threes is perfect, or, every set of three is complete, and this year will mark 20-time Grammy Award-winning guitarist Pat Metheny’s third time touring Australia in his 40-year-plus career, in what will be a particularly special evening.
Having previously graced Aussie stages back in 1985 and 2014, this time Metheny will be presenting a range of music from throughout his career.
“I’ve always enjoyed coming there over the years and thrilled to be bringing this particular presentation there,” he explains. “The whole thing we’re doing is something that’s a little different for me in the sense that I’m kind of focusing on playing older tunes, which is something I’ve never done before. I’m about 300 tunes in at this point or maybe more over all these years. And like most, you go write a bunch of new music and you make a record and then you do a tour and you play that music.
“But I never really made a meal out of just playing older tunes so I put together this very special group of musicians who grew up with a lot of my music – I can just start playing and they know all the tunes and we have a lot of fun sort of investigating the nooks and crannies of what those tunes could be,” he says.
The group of musicians selected positively exudes class. Metheny’s unmistakable guitar style is perfectly matched with British pianist Gwilym Simcock, the brilliant bassist Linda May Han Oh and long-time drummer Antonio Sanchez, who has been Metheny’s most consistent associate in a huge variety of settings since 2000.
“I would joke Antonio is the drummer I thought would never be born. The drums for me are the center of the universe in anything, and I just feel so lucky to be able to share the bandstand with Antonio, because in my opinion, he is the drummer of this moment in time,” Metheny praises.
“He plays the instrument at a level that almost no one has ever played at. But besides that, he’s just a fantastic musician. In addition to playing all the tricky fancy stuff that he obviously can do, he can play simple so well and it may be harder for me to find people who can play simple than anything.”
With a career that is nothing short of legendary, there’s little doubt that Metheny and his accompanying musicians will present a rare, unforgettable evening.
Having first burst onto the international jazz scene in 1974 with his soon-to-become trademarked playing style, Metheny reinvented what was known as the traditional jazz guitar sound for a whole new generation of players with his first album, Bright Size Life, released only a year later. Defining the beginnings for an illustrious career, Metheny has since continued to redefine the genre and push the boundaries and potential of his instrument, amassing to having 40 full-length recordings, and 20 Grammy Awards to his name.
“I think there are a lot of musicians who would look back across everything they’ve done and kind of go, ‘Oh my God, what was I thinking then, I would never do that now’, but it’s not like that for me at all,” Metheny reveals, referring to the evolution of his music over the past four decades.
“It’s one big long record. And the basic arrangements that I laid out on Bright Size Life, I still could play all those tunes – and sometimes do right now – and they still feel exactly as new to me now as they did then. And that’s true of all of it. It’s almost like a book that’s got a lot of different chapters, but it’s a singular book with a singular story. That’s what it’s like for me.”
So what songs can we expect to hear from Metheny’s forty-year long record?
“Since so much of what the focus of my existence is as a musician is built on improvising, it’s about finding the tunes that are able to kind of withstand getting pounded on night after night after night after night. And you can always find something to illuminate within those tunes to the audience through improvising,” Metheny says. “This is more about the tunes that are, I don’t want to say simpler, but that have the kind of robust quality as vehicles for improvising… Those are the kinds of tunes that I tend to lean on in a presentation like this.”
Metheny’s versatility on the jazz guitar is nearly without any peer on any instrument, and his deeply emotive music inhabits a multitude of musical worlds, guarantees that this will be a performance that can be enjoyed by musicians, jazz lovers and everyone in between.
“It’s the kind of night that can be enjoyed by everyone… even people that have no idea who I am. I can promise anybody that comes to the gig is going to flip out because it’s just a really good band.
“The thing that we’re doing, it’s sort of hard to describe exactly what it is. It doesn’t exactly fit anywhere, it’s its own thing. This band and this particular presentation that we’re doing is a really broad view of what my sense of music is and all that and the response to it has just been fantastic everywhere we’ve gone.”
See one of the brightest stars of the music scenes today at the Palais Theatre, Melbourne on Friday March 6. Tickets can be purchased via livenation.com.au