By Des Cowley
Pat Metheny: Illuminating a Sound (Appearing at: Vivid LIVE, Sydney Opera House, 1 June 2025)
Next month, Pat Metheny heads to our shores, giving his first Australian concert since March 2020. He’s scheduled to play at the Sydney Opera House on 1 June, as part of the Vivid LIVE Festival, a near month-long event celebrating ‘creativity, innovation and technology’. This time round, he’ll be packing just a swag of guitars, as part of the Dreambox/MoonDial world tour, billed as a solo concert experience highlighting his recent albums, alongside selections from his back catalogue.
And what a catalogue it is, beginning nearly half-a-century ago with debut album Bright Size Life (1976). There are few guitarists on the planet who have carved out such a career, or traversed as much musical territory, as Metheny, chalking up fifty-plus albums, and garnering twenty Grammys (across ten different categories).
I confess I got off to a rocky start with Metheny’s music, having initially come to it via Letter Home, his 1989 flirtation with Brazilian themes, featuring long-term Pat Metheny Group stalwart Lyle Mays. At the time, it sounded too, well, light. But it didn’t take long before I was won over, goaded by the sheer magnitude and dazzling eclecticism of his oeuvre. Just a few examples will suffice: his overdubbed tour de force playing on Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint; his adventurous duo outing with Ornette Coleman on Song X; the ear-shredding noise-fest of Zero Tolerance for Silence; or Tap, his contribution to John Zorn’s on-going Masada project.
I later deduced that my initial response to Letter Home was equivalent to looking at a tiny fragment of one of Monet’s Water-Lilies. I needed to step back and take in the whole canvas.
While the solo format of Dream Box and MoonDial is not unique in Metheny’s discography – previous solo outings include One Quiet Night (2003), or What’s It All About (2011) – there’s clearly a renewed emphasis and focus, with these latest albums, on the subtleties and nuances of his instrument/s: the textures, chromatics, alternate tunings, the overall sound palette.
His forthcoming Sydney show, then, is surely something to get buzzed about, especially given he’ll be bringing along some of his favourite instruments, including the 42 string Pikasso guitar, and the nylon string baritone guitar heard on MoonDial, both of which were built for him by Canadian luthier Linda Manzer. The latter instrument set him off in search for the perfect nylon strings, which he eventually sourced from Buenos Aries. For Metheny, these strings, when added to Manzer’s baritone guitar, produced an immediate revelatory flash, revealing an entire new range of possibilities: “There was suddenly a whole new palette of sound under my fingers, just like that.”
So, what can local audiences expect from his Sydney show? Pat admits to being excited about this current tour. With over a hundred and fifty concerts around the world already behind him, he considers these current shows unlike anything he’s done before.
While Metheny has long inserted solo segments into his live shows, the current Dream Box/MoonDial tour represents his first large-scale foray into extended solo performance. The format of these shows both foster and encourage an intimacy with the audience, something you’d be hard pressed to replicate playing with a full band. This rapport – it’s just Metheny and his guitars onstage – affords him an opportunity to reflect on his career, his approach to songwriting, his relationship with his chosen instrument. He’s mindful of the subtle shift, but is otherwise unfazed: “Maybe the thing that sets apart this tour from any other that I have done is that I talk quite a bit. I have never done that before, but somehow it fits with the nature of this presentation. It still feels like a regular tour for me, just that the instrumentation is different.”
MoonDial features original compositions, along with standards, such as Chick Corea’s ‘You’re Everything’, Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Here There and Everywhere’, and Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Somewhere’, some of which are likely to feature in his Sydney show. For a musician with hundreds of compositions to his name, I was curious about his predilection for playing occasional standards. But, as he makes clear, it’s not that simple: “It’s funny…the tunes of mine that I play I don’t think of as ‘mine’ any more than a standard is ‘mine’…they are what they are and the possibilities they hold are not limited to their origins. At least that is how I see it. Once I have completed a tune it has a life of its own that may or may not have anything to do with me, or really anyone else. If it is a good one, it just kind of is.”
Metheny has had the good fortune to work with an incredible array of talented musicians. His own bands have featured players like keyboardist Lyle Mays, drummer Antonio Sanchez, saxophonists Michael Brecker and Chris Potter, and trumpeter Cong Vu. Then there have been the remarkable series of collaborations, his meetings with Charlie Haden, Ornette Coleman, Jim Hall, Brad Mehldau, Chick Corea, Gary Burton. Casting an eye across those names, it’s hard to credit it’s all been squeezed into a single lifetime. How does it feel to have made records with musicians like Hall, Coleman, or Haden, veritable giants who are no longer with us? Metheny’s attitude is both self-effacing and circumspect: “In all the cases you mentioned, of course there is the musical thing, but beyond that is that those were some of the best people I have ever met, musicians or not. And Charlie [Haden] in particular was my best friend ever. So that kind of sits above all else for me.”
Such is Metheny’s reputation as a guitar player, it’s sometimes easy to overlook his exceptional body of work as a composer. If given a choice, I wondered whether he wouldn’t like to be remembered as a composer, a master improviser, AND a guitar player? It’s a notion he’s clearly bemused by: “It is funny for me to hear that. I don’t really think about ‘guitar’ that much. It is sort of this translation device for me of ideas. However, this particular year kind of put me in a position, maybe for the first time since high school, where my priorities really needed to shift the guitar playing part of things much higher up on the list. What I do know is that after a year-plus of doing this now, I improved a lot just by virtue of playing in this type of a setting night after night where the guitar itself is sort of the whole thing. It makes me kind of wish I had been working on the instrument more in that way across the years.” Once more, I was struck by Metheny’s humility, as if he hasn’t been working hard on his instrument his whole life.
While Metheny’s music is generally filed under jazz, few jazz artists have produced a body of work as wide-ranging, varied, and diverse. If I listen to albums by the Pat Metheny Group, or Electric Counterpoint, or Song X, or Sign of 4, or the solo records, I have trouble getting my head around the fact that it’s all coming out of one individual. When I put it to him, he is philosophical about this omnivorous approach: “To me, music is one big universal thing. The musicians I have admired the most are the ones who have a deep reservoir of knowledge and insight not just about music, but about life in general and are able to illuminate the things that they love in sound.” Listening to Metheny’s music, it’s clear he has spent a lifetime doing just that, illuminating the things he’s loved in sound.
Unlike many musicians entering their eighth decade, Metheny shows no signs of slowing down. He remains as excited about the next instrument that might come his way, the next band he plays with, the next sound he discovers. In the past five years, he’s recorded and released some of his most exciting music. If in doubt, look no further than the free-form group interplay displayed on Side-Eye NYC (2021), or the visionary, magisterial From this Place (2020), featuring Australian bassist Linda May Han Oh.
Dreambox and MoonDial embody a more lyrical, reflective chapter in Metheny’s journey, there’s a sense he’s distilling life-lessons learnt on the way, zeroing in on the gist of what the guitar – in all its forms – means to him. His Sydney Opera House performance promises to be a unique experience, a rare opportunity to participate in Metheny’s continued pursuit of ‘new sonic and harmonic’ realms.
Pat Metheny plays at the Sydney Opera House, 1 June 2025
https://www.vividsydney.com/event/music/pat-metheny-vivid-live