anyone wanna discuss pat metheny style improvisation?

[Boston Joe]

The 'Question and Answer' CD is one of my favourites, not only does Pat play well, but Roy Haynes is just amazing throughout, superb 'in-your-face' drumming.

I played this recently to a friend who is a jazz-lover but has never liked Metheny much, and he was so enthused he couldn't wait to get it.

I really love Q&A, but The Way Up is my favorite.

[dasein]

Mr. Metheny calls the solo "the shot heard 'round the world," in terms of its aftereffects in subsequent jazz, especially through Keith Jarrett. He describes Mr. Bley's solo as having an "inevitability."

"His relationship to time," Mr. Metheny said, "is the best sort of pushing and pulling; wrestling with it and at the same time, phrase by phrase, making these interesting connections between bass and drums, making it seem like it's a little bit on top, and then now it's a little bit behind." (He held an index finger straight up, and moved it slightly to the right and left, like a bubble in a carpenter's level, or an electronic tuning meter.)"But there's also this X factor," he continued. "It's the sense of each thing leading very naturally to the next thing. He's letting each idea go to its own natural conclusion. He's reconciling that with a form, of course, that we all know very well. And he's following the harmony, but he's not. It just feels like, 'Why didn't anybody else do that before?' "

"The solo" refers to Paul Bley's famous solo on this track:

[christianm77]

I've never heard that solo before and had no idea of it's significance.

[christianm77]

I can actually hear the connection to Metheny actually - I'm imagining the phrases being played with his guitar sound.

[pcsanwald]

I can actually hear the connection to Metheny actually - I'm imagining the phrases being played with his guitar sound.

I don't think Paul Bley's influence on Metheny's generation gets talked about enough. Bley was also a huge influence on Frisell. One thing I think is interesting to note is that Pat has always, from very very early on, been a huge champion of Frisell, recommending him for gigs, recording sessions, etc.

I agree that in terms of harmonic language, I hear much more of a triadic + chromatic concept than traditional bebop language, although obviously his phrasing and rhythm have been profoundly affected by bebop. But much like Ornette and Bley, Pat has a way of improvising extremely catchy melodies that is almost impossible to teach IMHO. This has always been the most compelling part of Pat's playing for me, and I have no doubt that part of that comes out of that kind of triadic thing that he does so well.

[lawson-stone]

I really love Q&A, but The Way Up is my favorite.

The Way Up in my mind codifies all that PMG had done up to that point and rolled it into a single, massive, compelling statement.

I saw that one live in Detroit and it was only about the 3rd time they had done the show. Except for Pat, the others were using charts! Second half was "greatest hits" and amazing. Almost 4 hours and PM never left the stage.

Whatever else you might say, Pat Metheny WORKS HARD.

[christianm77]

Man, any time I get all miserable about the hours I have to put in hustling gigs, organising my band and driving my band halfway across the country, I remember that Metheny did all the same stuff.

And if he had to do it, I definitely have to do it.

A grafter. But then every successful musician is, however talented.

[jzucker]

I think it's more than that. He distinctly avoids using melodic and harmonic minor as well as diminished arpeggios and scales/modes on that album. Everything he plays is pretty much diatonic to Ionian and lots of pentatonics and major arpeggios. Of course, he moves them in and out of the harmony to create dissonances.

Metheny certainly has a distinctive way of forming melodies while improvising whilst keeping to the changes. I really love his playing and Bright Size Life may actually be my favourite record by his.

I find his tunes hard to improvise over. Because a) you have to play the changes, even though they are folky/pop-like, and b) you really have to make melodies, otherwise you’ll just sound bad, really bad. I tried the bebop licks thing over his songs too and failed miserably.

However I’ve read tons of interviews with Metheny and he always hammers on the importance of bebop language and how important it is to learn to navigate changes like the bebop guys do. He even said the first thing he does when he hires a new guy for his group is play a bunch of bebop/standard tunes with them to check whether they understand the language.

So that brings me to the following: use bebop sensitivity and harmonic navigation as in connecting chord tones and spelling out the harmony in your lines, but still try to make lyrical melodies. I think that is the best I can do for now

[jzucker]

I know I am in a decisive minority, but Pat Metheny’s playing does nothing for me. I just don’t hear any soul at all in his approach. Got that typical Berkeley thing going on. (Been wanting to say that for a long time.) Hope I didn’t offend anyone!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I hear tons of soul and apparently so did Herbie Hancock, Mike Brecker, Brad Meldauh, Jim Hall, John Scofield, Gary Burton, Ralph Towner, Joni Mitchell and any of the other 1000+ BIG NAME jazz and pop musicians who are on waiting lists to play with him. Besides, just stay out of the thread if you aren't interested in making a positive contribution. I don't see the point?!?

[Bluedawg]

Metheny was my gateway into jazz .... opened a lot of doors for me

I love his playing ...

I dabble with Bright Sized Life and Lone Jack in my usual noodling and would really like to dig deeper into his style


but I'm torn between wanting to dive deeper into it his playing

and the statements I've read were he and other top jazz musicians complain about so many other younger guitarist's that sound like copies of Metheny.

Not that it will ever really matter for me whether I sound too much like Metheny or not ... LOL

[jzucker]

A friend of mine studied with him at berklee and now teaches at umber college and Pat just did a 3 day workshop there. (Joey Goldstein). Joey told me that Pat could do all the wes/bop lines on standards but deliberately stayed away from the language for his own group. If you listen to question and answer, he's got much more of that going on but you're right, he's definitely not a melodic minor/diminished scale mode guy...

I’d be the last person to describe myself as a Metheny expert but I would say from my investigations of his playing - mostly the early stuff - he is not someone I would associate with melodic minor language. Or dim for that matter. So the OP rings true for me.

Metheny’s palette to me sounds derived heavily from the pentatonics, major scale and modes and triads in close and open position in particular.

He also has a side line in surprisingly old school bop language which presumably comes from Wes. A lot of the chromaticism I hear in his playing is kind of beboppy. But this is not IMO the 'meat' of his playing, more the 'spice'.

And then the guitaristic effects such as sideslipping out of the key by a semitone and chromatic planing licks. These I think he uses these as special effects to build tension etc.

The note choices are often pretty straightforward. The phrasing is slippery. And a completely characteristic pick sound.

Also fretting - Metheny has in common with Wes that he likes to play along the string rather than in position. He also seems to like low positions a lot, again like Wes.

Continuous scale exercise and triads through BSL would be a good prep for soloing on the tune.

[jzucker]

i don't worry about that stuff. I copy for my own education!

Metheny was my gateway into jazz .... opened a lot of doors for me

I love his playing ...

I dabble with Bright Sized Life and Lone Jack in my usual noodling and would really like to dig deeper into his style


but I'm torn between wanting to dive deeper into it his playing

and the statements I've read were he and other top jazz musicians complain about so many other younger guitarist's that sound like copies of Metheny.

Not that it will ever really matter for me whether I sound too much like Metheny or not ... LOL

[JeanSut]

On that whole album, he almost never uses any altered dominant or diminished scale language. It's very refreshing and surprisingly difficult to do.

I think so too. Especially on those kind of tunes he doesn't use a lot of bebop language.
At the same time you can hear lots of diminished scale and altered sounds if he plays standards.

Not picking every note and phrasing in a horn like manner is a thing that he got from Wes and Jim Hall and others.
In his youth the older players would not allow him to play Wes Montgomery Licks. That's a thing that he mentioned
in a couple of interviews. So avoiding cliches might be a result because of that.

[christianm77]

A friend of mine studied with him at berklee and now teaches at umber college and Pat just did a 3 day workshop there. (Joey Goldstein). Joey told me that Pat could do all the wes/bop lines on standards but deliberately stayed away from the language for his own group. If you listen to question and answer, he's got much more of that going on but you're right, he's definitely not a melodic minor/diminished scale mode guy...

You can certainly here the heavy bop coming through on that lesson I posted, and the early Stella recording.

[jzucker]

[COLOR=#1D2129][FONT=Helvetica]
I think so too. Especially on those kind of tunes he doesn't use a lot of bebop language.
At the same time you can hear lots of diminished scale and altered sounds if he plays standards.

Not picking every note and phrasing in a horn like manner is a thing that he got from Wes and Jim Hall and others.
In his youth the older players would not allow him to play Wes Montgomery Licks. That's a thing that he mentioned
in a couple of interviews. So avoiding cliches might be a result because of that.

i don't hear much dim and altered dominant sounds in his playing on standards either.

[christianm77]

[COLOR=#1D2129][FONT=Helvetica]
In his youth the older players would not allow him to play Wes Montgomery Licks. That's a thing that he mentioned
in a couple of interviews. So avoiding cliches might be a result because of that.

That's interesting. Bruce Foreman mentioned that older players took a dim view of quoting other people's licks. They saw it as disrespectful.

[pingu]

Besides, just stay out of the thread if you aren't interested in making a positive contribution. I don't see the point?!?

the point is to agree and to disagree about stuff jack
to discuss it ....

[mr. beaumont]

the point is to agree and to disagree about stuff jack
to discuss it ....

Agreeing and disagreeing is fine, "I don't like Pat Metheny" has no pertinence to this thread. It's about how to approach PM tunes, not what you think of them.

[mikostep]

I find much satisfaction in listening to his two albums Secret Story and Beyond the Missouri sky. Second one is one of my all time favorite guitaristic album. The naked soul of just two acoustic (and somehow) limited instruments just kills.
The Secret Story album reveals in a different light a lot of rhythmic figures that he is using.

His connections of left and right hand (technically), his rhythmic sense and what is inside him in that department, his dynamics and his compositional approach is not much discussed and I would really like to hear that.

I, like others have mentioned, also started with jazz trough his albums and have listened all of them. Altough he has changed trough the years I like all of his periods.

For those who are interested Rick Beato have some interesting YouTube videos of his style.

Sent from my SM-C7000 using Tapatalk

[mr. beaumont]

Missouri Sky is one of my favorite albums ever. The whole thing is just gorgeous.

[neatomic]

az- key player/teacher in pat m's development...(one could argue the source of pats uniqueness!)

metheny on attila zoller


cheers

[rpjazzguitar]

az- key player/teacher in pat m's development...(one could argue the source of pats uniqueness!)

metheny on attila zoller


cheers

There seems to be a way in which PM plays a few sets of triplets leading up to the chord change, whereas the bop guys seemed to play triplets in response to the chord change. Not every lick, but tendencies.

One thing that strikes me as remarkable about Bright Size Life is that I don't recall having heard any earlier music that foreshadowed it. Maybe there was something I missed (I hadn't listened to Bley, for example). But, at the time it sounded dramatically different than anything I'd heard.

When I heard him on the 80/81 tour, I think (Motian, Haden, Redman) he played Stella, but sounded PM slippery -- reminding me not at all of the usual paths I'd heard through Stella.

Sometimes, on guitar, there are feels that seem elusive and then you can suddenly get in the right mind-set and start playing them. I get the feeling that PM became more himself when he started to feel that slippery approach, for want of a better descriptor.

Also, I have heard at least one great player talk about devices he simply won't use because they would make his sound more familiar or, perhaps, hackneyed.

[whiskey02]

"I find his tunes hard to improvise over. Because a) you have to play the changes, even though they are folky/pop-like, and b) you really have to make melodies, otherwise you’ll just sound bad, really bad. I tried the bebop licks thing over his songs too and failed miserably."

Well put Amsterdambass.

I think this statement sums up at least early PM; yeah you have to "play the changes" but not let anyone know that you are! Strong melodies that work perfectly over the chords without "outlining" the changes.
Of course Jack you already know that Pat and Jaco's collaboration was about "breaking the status quo" of what jazz had become - a sideshow historic look back at the good ol' days and the mindset that THAT is what jazz WAS and all it's going to be. So you really can't play much of anything before BSL. The old cliches and common lines, targetting 3 and 7 don't work because the tunes were written to get beyond what had already be done, to move jazz forward and break the "chains"of the past. Just the fact that it's played with straight 8ths means it can't "feel" like what you used to hearing.

[christianm77]

"I find his tunes hard to improvise over. Because a) you have to play the changes, even though they are folky/pop-like, and b) you really have to make melodies, otherwise you’ll just sound bad, really bad. I tried the bebop licks thing over his songs too and failed miserably."

Well put Amsterdambass.

I think this statement sums up at least early PM; yeah you have to "play the changes" but not let anyone know that you are! Strong melodies that work perfectly over the chords without "outlining" the changes.
Of course Jack you already know that Pat and Jaco's collaboration was about "breaking the status quo" of what jazz had become - a sideshow historic look back at the good ol' days and the mindset that THAT is what jazz WAS and all it's going to be. So you really can't play much of anything before BSL. The old cliches and common lines, targetting 3 and 7 don't work because the tunes were written to get beyond what had already be done, to move jazz forward and break the "chains"of the past. Just the fact that it's played with straight 8ths means it can't "feel" like what you used to hearing.

IIRC the way Pat tells it was a reaction against the vamp based non-harmonic modal fusion that dominated the early 1970s. I’ve not read Metheny ever saying it was a reaction against straightahead jazz, but maybe he did.

I wasn’t there but I get the impression acoustic jazz was pretty irrelevant culturally in the 70s. Wynton hadn’t appeared yet.

Pat brought harmony back to the table. I think the influence of Brazilian music is tremendously important. Metheny like Jobim is a bassline oriented composer not a ii-v-i guy.

[JakeAcci]

Just adding I think something that really sets P.Meth (my new shorthand for him) apart is his rhythmic conception. The way he works with subdivisions is very tight and very different from what a lot of people do, and the legato thing helps him with this. I think he has as much unique language in his rhythms as he does in his articulations. But yeah his pitch collections or voicings often aren't anything amazing on their own.