“What are you reading?”, a visitor asks? Oh, a book about Pat Metheny (visitor looks blank) explaining how his music works. Visitor: “Well, if the music needs someone to explain how it works, then obviously it doesn’t really work the way music should”.

Politeness meant I did not demur, but I should have. Appreciating music, except for a few infant savants, is learned, and learning more can surely deepen that appreciation. As with any other art, denying that cuts you off from pleasure you might enjoy.

Pianist and academic Bob Gluck wants to helps us learn more about Pat Metheny’s work and methods. When Gluck began playing many of the celebrated guitarist and bandleader’s compositions, he was drawn into investigating how they worked, and then analysed the writing and playing on a large sample of his recordings, as well as scores provided by the man himself. Along with a biographical sketch and some new interview reflections from Metheny and key bandmates, this makes short book a solid addition to the already extensive literature on an artist hugely popular in the jazz world and far beyond.

Gluck lays out a range of aspects of the music, in chapters distinguished by extremely detailed discussion of items from the vast Metheny oeuvre. His key idea, as the subtitle indicates, is music as a kind of story-telling. It’s a familiar notion, and one his subject has frequently alluded to. That can happen in a single solo, or an entire album-length composition, and there are examples of both. Metheny, as Gluck notes, uses story as “a metaphor for the dynamic unfolding of a musical work rather than a plotline”. The author, though, mainly has a different sense in mind, where the music conjures an actual story in the mind of an individual listener, perhaps prompted by some association of the title or other words that accompany a composition.

That approach is elaborated in the last chapter on “listening interpretively”, where he relates what comes to mind while attending to two long pieces, America Undefined and Is This America? (Katrina 2005).

Before then come chapters looking at motivic improvisation, on the sounds Metheny has conjured from his guitar and its various electronically enhanced derivatives, on the internal workings of the long-lived Pat Metheny Group, and on Metheny’s use of wordless vocals. The exposition here often gets pretty technical, and although Gluck begins with the hope the book can be a “listeners’ guide”, the musical analysis is often at a level more helpful for the professional reader. There are many points of interest for the lay listener, but it isn’t always clear how these investigations relate to the overall project of the book. Rather, Gluck seems to try a range of different approaches to getting under the surface of the music, to see what appears, then move on. All are illuminating in their way, though, even if they don’t necessarily fit together. There are plenty of interesting comments from Metheny himself, and colleagues such as Steve Rodby and Antonio Sánchez. And Gluck makes good use of older interviews. He includes this well-known remark from Pat on melody, which I’ve always thought especially revealing: “For me sound and the expression of sound is always about melody. To me melody appears in many different ways. Every conversation, every experience of walking down the street, every experience of hearing an aeroplane take off, trash cans falling down a flight of stairs, I perceive all of it as melody. This has become more and more acute as time has gone by. You can find melody any place that you look for it.”

Gluck quite rightly emphasises Metheny’s strength as a melodist, although the author doesn’t really pick up on this more expansive notion of melody. Rather, he is interested in the additional elements that enhance it. That’s a focus that results in occasional remarks of the sort that almost anyone who tries to write about music can be reduced to such as: “Melody alone, however, cannot sustain an extended work like ‘Imaginary Day’. A blend of rich and varied instrumental colors and attentive management of changing overall densities and dynamic levels are among the musical elements that add nuance to melody, harmony and rhythm, thus holding the interest of listeners across a lengthy work”. Pause on that, and find it fails to add to one’s understanding in two ways. It’s a statement of the obvious. And it applies to every worthwhile composer and arranger you can think of.

When he returns to musical unfolding as a key to narrative in his final chapter, Gluck takes the two pieces under discussion to be representations, in some imaginatively conceived sense, of aspects of American history. That didn’t work particularly for me. Nor, he concedes is there any special reason to think it should. He simply wants to demonstrate, I think, that the music has the capacity to prompt a narrative response if you let it, rather than suggest any such response is the “right” one.

All of which leaves an impression that Gluck has circled round the great problem of musical communication – why do we respond as we do to these abstract, non-representational sounds? – without solving it. That would be too much to expect, of course: it remains the mystery at the heart of music-making.

More personally, the book didn’t quite succeed in its other ambition. Gluck certainly induced me to listen to a slew of recordings I hadn’t attended to properly before. Alas, even with his generous commentaries, the main effect was to reinforce my existing bias. I love Pat the melodist, and Pat the improviser, especially when he is working with his peers in jazz – Gary Burton; Jaco Pastorius and Bob Moses; Roy Haynes and Dave Holland; Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart; Ornette Coleman or Charlie Haden. But the sound world of the Pat Metheny Group, with its portentious orchestral synth backdrops and wordless vocals, is not somewhere I care to dwell. My personal reaction is stuck where it sat in the 1980s: the more of his preferred orchestral effects Metheny tries to achieve, the less appealing the music becomes. I’m glad to have been prompted to reconsider this by Gluck’s thoughtful exposition of how this side of his work is achieved. But it turns out I may be closer to agreeing with my visitor than I first thought.

from https://ukjazznews.com