Room for Everybody

By TERRY TEACHOUT

Good news for anxious boomers: playing jazz keeps you young. At the end of a quarter-century of grueling one-nighters, guitarist Pat Metheny still has the same easy small-town grin and messy mop of gopher brown hair seen on the back cover of his very first solo album; he also has a 15-month-old son, Nicolas Djakeem, on whom he dotes in between far-flung gigs. Twenty-five years and 25 albums after his hugely influential Bright Size Life helped nudge jazz and rock closer together, Metheny, 45, continues to play for delighted crowds everywhere from Istanbul to Albuquerque. "Sometimes I feel like my whole life has been one long world tour," he says wryly. Now, with three new CDs and a 400-page, 167-tune Pat Metheny Songbook soon to be published, the affable Missourian who invented the most recognizable sound in post-bebop jazz guitar--warm, songful solo lines shimmering through a summery haze of digital reverb--shows no signs of settling into a comfy middle age.

He is best known for his work with the Pat Metheny Group, the long-lived fusion quartet whose richly textured, Brazilian-flavored albums, with their smooth synthesized surfaces, appeal to listeners for whom jazz is normally a four-letter word. But Metheny has always made a point of playing and recording in a variety of other styles as well. His tastes are exceptionally wide-ranging--he's equally fond of Igor Stravinsky, avant-garde jazzman Ornette Coleman and the Beatles--and when he's not on the road with the Metheny Group, there's no telling what kind of music he'll be making on stage or in the studio.

On Trio 99[to]00 (Warner Bros.), due out Feb. 8, Metheny teams up with two of the hottest young guns on the New York City jazz scene, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Bill Stewart, for a bare-bones blowing session recorded in two days flat. The songs range from no-nonsense blues like Metheny's own (Go) Git It to a feathery bossa nova romp through the harmonic obstacle course of John Coltrane's Giant Steps. The biggest surprise is the old-fashioned show tune A Lot of Livin' to Do, coolly reharmonized in the oblique, quizzical manner of Metheny's idol, the peerless jazz guitarist Jim Hall. Metheny's three previous trio albums rank with his strongest work, and Trio 99[to]00 proves that his improvisational reflexes are as fast as ever; the new millennium now has its first great guitar album.

Hall's influence on Trio 99[to]00 is understandable, since Metheny's previous CD, Jim Hall & Pat Metheny (Telarc), released last year, teamed the two friends for a bewitching program of unaccompanied duets. "It encapsulates the love and respect I have for Jim," Metheny says. Best of all is a magically spare version of Farmer's Trust, a tender waltz originally recorded by the Metheny Group in 1982, which leaves no doubt that despite his love of ear-popping electronic effects, he is above all a wonderfully fluent spinner of simple yet indelible melodies.

Metheny's melodic side is also in evidence throughout his haunting score for the film version of Jane Hamilton's novel A Map of the World (Warner Bros.). Its spacious, Coplandesque lyricism is clearly the work of a composer who grew up on the prairie's edge (he comes from Lee's Summit, a suburb of Kansas City). "The geography of Missouri has had an incredibly strong aesthetic impact on me," he says. "You see everything from a distance. You look out and there's a tree, and 25 miles beyond it there's a pond. And whenever I'm playing or writing, I see that landscape in my mind all the time."

Metheny shuns labels for his polystylistic music--particularly fusion, a term he feels has "nothing but negative connotations"--preferring to describe it as jazz, pure and simple. "Jazz is the all-inclusive form," he explains. "There's room for everybody, for anything of true musical substance. Jazz guys like Duke Ellington or Miles Davis have always transformed the elements of the pop culture that surrounds us into something more sophisticated and hipper. It's their job."

One label, however, meets with his wholehearted approval. Veteran bassist Charlie Haden, a longtime admirer and sometime collaborator (Rejoicing, Beyond the Missouri Sky), calls Metheny's music "contemporary impressionistic Americana." Asked to comment, the guitarist breaks out in a smile as wide as the Great Plains. "I like that one," he says. "I'll buy that." Us too.