Over the course of more than 20 years as a recording artist, Pat Metheny has released album after album, each one brilliantly documenting another aspect of his unique and nearly uncategorizable musical journey. Exhibiting an insatiable creative energy, Metheny has participated in just about every avenue of modern music-making that the late 20th century might offer a musician. Seemingly bent on blurring and obliterating stylistic boundaries at every opportunity, he has created Grammy-winning albums with his regular Pat Metheny Group, soundtracks for major motion pictures, solo albums, duets with major artists such as Charlie Haden and Jim Hall, and collaborations with other significant major figures such as Ornette Coleman and Steve Reich and many others.
But for a certain group of his followers, there is no setting that defines Metheny the musician as clearly as his trio records. Scattered among the chronology of his vast recorded output are three of the most revered, studied and influential guitar trio albums of our time; Bright Size Life: recorded in 1975 with Metheny's first working band, featuring bassist Jaco Pastorius and drummer Bob Moses - a record that literally had the effect of changing the entire language of jazz guitar practically overnight and reclaiming it for a new generation of players; Rejoicing, recorded in 1984 with Metheny's working trio of the mid-80's, featuring bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins; and Question And Answer, an incendiary meeting of three of the most quick-thinking improvisers of this era - Metheny meets his "main hero" Roy Haynes on drums with the incomparable Dave Holland joining in on bass.
THE RECORD
With the release of TRIO 99>00, Metheny matches the heights of those previous trio releases and then some. This recording has some of the most impressive modern jazz improvising ever laid down on that sometimes unwieldy-for-the-task six-string monster. We have never heard Metheny more at home with his over and under the bar line phrasing and apparently endless flow of melody. There are also startling new developments in the areas of octave displacement and a general intervallic command that is essentially new - and a harmonic fluency that would be rare for the best improvising saxophonists, practically unheard of in a guitarist. Mixed in with the already highly-refined sense of melodic development that Metheny shares with just a handful of modern improvisers is a fearless and exuberant sense of rhythmic purpose and direction that allows him to play chorus after chorus of ideas that are as fresh as they are swinging. Make no mistake about it; this is some of the most satisfying Metheny ever committed to tape, which at this point is really saying something.
On TRIO 99>00, Metheny is matched with a rhythm section that includes two of the most impressive members of the thriving New York scene of musicians who have absorbed the tradition and yet remain actively committed to adding elements of their own musical world to it without resorting to a simple mimicking of previous styles: bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Bill Stewart.
THE TRIO
Larry Grenadier first came on the national scene as a touring member of Joe Henderson's working bands and went on to play and record with Gary Burton and many others. Larry has been an active member of a loose community of like-minded players that includes some of the most important musicians to appear in this period, like Chris Potter, Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau. He is a perfect bassist for Metheny; his huge sound, impressive rhythmic heft and especially his ability to listen to, absorb and respond instantly to the melodic/harmonic suggestions of Metheny's liquid thinking put him in the rare company of great bassists who have helped make Metheny's earlier trio records so successful.
Metheny and drummer Bill Stewart have a rapport that is simply magnificent on this recording. Stewart is regarded by nearly everyone as the most impressive new jazz drummer of the past 15 years. His many "Best Jazz Drummer" awards in drum magazine polls are as impressive as the high regard in which he is held by musicians such as Metheny, John Scofield, Joe Lovano and many others. The major impact that his playing has had on scores of young drummers as evidenced by the legions of student musicians around the world working to emulate his distinctive style. Metheny says, "His rhythmic precision and musical common sense is balanced by a zany streak that keeps his playing in a state of permanent red-alert. He is always aware of the music as a whole and is always making decisions - great decisions - about all the different ways he can keep the music moving forward. His minute by minute listening skills, his incredibly evolved sense of form and tension/release make him one of the most impressive musicians, not just drummers, I have ever played with."
Like a previous Metheny trio recording, Question And Answer, this trio came together as Metheny finished a two-year stretch of recording and touring around the world with his regular Group. For his "vacation" period, Metheny decided to find a few like-minded younger players and continue once again to expand on his unique vision of what a guitar-led, improvisationally-driven three-piece ensemble could suggest within this modern culture of music.
"It's true that as much as I enjoy the open-endedness of the Group and the incredible freedom that exists in that world , I also love the sort of mobility and day to day flexibility that playing in a trio affords me. With the Group, each piece is more than just a tune, it's a whole musical environment that is set up to focus on or highlight a very particular kind of improvising, specific to that piece's place in a larger vocabulary of sound. In a trio situation, the focus is different, even the specific role of the guitar is changed. In the Group, I am kind of like the singer, the lead voice. In a trio situation, I am that too, but I can also morph into being the accompanist, or an additional rhythm section member or a colorist or shift between all those roles on a moment's notice. Actually, playing in a trio, in many ways is the easiest thing for me because it is actually the situation that I have played in the longest. Even when I was really young, growing up and working in groups around Kansas City, I always had some kind of guitar, bass and drums trio thing going on. It's the core of my thing in a lot of ways. When I first started the PMG, it was more about adding Lyle Mays to that trio conception and then working out from there than starting something from scratch."
THE COMPOSITIONS
These new tunes, like their predecessors on the earlier trio records, will no doubt become modern jazz standards, much the way tunes like "Bright Size Life" and "Question And Answer" have become. Metheny says, "We finished our tour in Istanbul. We had two days off before we were going to convene in New York to record, so I locked myself in a room for a day and, thinking of all the things that I really loved about playing with Bill and Larry, wrote five new tunes. The tunes just flowed out. They are basically the kind of 'blowing tunes' that set up a vibe where the improvisation has a context and a starting point, but can be played a million different ways from night to night. Also, for some reason, I have always loved the tune 'I've Got A Lot Of Livin' To Do' from the musical Bye, Bye Birdie, so I wrote an arrangement of that one for those guys that honestly doesn't really have a lot to do with the original at this point, but sounds how I always imagined that tune sounding in this kind of a setting."
Although Metheny has often recorded the music of the great jazz composer Ornette Coleman over the years, Trio 99>00 also offers something that Metheny watchers have never heard on one of his own albums; Metheny versions of compositions by two of the major saxophonist/composers of the '60s: Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane.
"'Capricorn' is a Wayne Shorter tune that I have always loved but don't recall ever hearing anyone else play. 'Giant Steps' is, of course, the John Coltrane composition that I think I have now heard everyone else play. It is simply one of the most inspiring pieces of musical architecture of the century. Usually I hear everyone kind of race through it, playing it really fast (the tune seems to really like that way of getting played) but my take on it here was to do more like the style of one of my own tunes, slower, with a little more opportunity to linger on the implications of each chord change. I added a bridge as a release device, which kind of breaks it up some. Even though it's slower than usual here, I wanted it to have a sense of movement and that kind of wave-like thing that those chords suggest, so there is a lot of doubling up on the changes, even early on in the solo. But that is a tune you could play like a foxtrot and it would still be hip, there is just so much built into it."
In recent years, with projects such as Beyond The Missouri Sky with Charlie Haden and his score for the recent, critically-acclaimed movie, A Map Of The World, Metheny has continued to develop a sound on the acoustic guitar that is as distinctive as it is personal. There are three Metheny compositions that feature his excellent acoustic guitar playing on TRIO 99>00.
"Each of the three acoustic guitar tunes are different. One of the best parts about playing with Larry and Bill is the stylistic range they have. Like a lot of younger players, style is just not an issue. I wanted to take advantage of that flexibility and write something that was quite different than the more swing-based grooves that most of the music was leaning towards. We had played a bunch of concerts in Italy (which is probably my favorite place on earth to play) and I wanted to write a piece that captured the beauty and joy of our week traveling around the country, playing gigs in these amazing places and that also had Larry and Bill playing in a very simple, almost folk-like way. That tune became 'Just Like The Day,' a piece where the low note of the guitar is dropped down a whole step to D to give Larry and me a chance to form an ensemble part at the bottom that the tune is based on.
"'We Had A Sister' is a piece that I wrote for Joshua Redman's debut album, Wish. I had always wanted to record my own version of this tune and here it becomes almost like a piano trio version of the piece. Because of the dense harmonic structure of the tune, I found myself playing a lot of chords in the improvised section to keep the clarity of the structure intact - not something I am normally inclined to do, even in a trio.
"And 'Travels' is simply one of my favorite tunes to come from the writing partnership that I have enjoyed for so many years with Lyle Mays. There has never been a studio recording of this tune - it only exists on the live record Travels - it happens to lay well on the guitar harmonically, and again, it is a groove that both Larry and Bill are fantastic at playing."
THE RECORDING
The recording itself is a detailed, 24-bit soundscape that gives the listener a sense of practically being inside the music as it is being created. Metheny says, "I have done a lot of different kinds of recording over the years at this point, from recording entire albums in a few hours - what I call 'documentary style recording' - to spending weeks at a time going over the most minute details of the recording process. It really depends on what kind of story you want to tell, and of course, what the function of the actual notes will have within that storytelling environment.
"This record, this way of playing and thinking about music is, in fact, best served by doing it really fast. We spent just a couple of days together in the studio, just for a few hours a day, just playing. We didn't even listen back to anything. The engineer, Rob Eaton, has worked on dozens of records with me, he knows how to get what is going on down on tape and I really trust him, so we could just play and not worry about the recording part of it much at all. A few weeks after we recorded, I began to look at what we had done, not really even knowing what was there. I was so happy with what I heard."
The result is a worthy addition to the extraordinary body of work that Metheny has been building since he burst onto the international jazz scene as an innovative 18-year-old in 1974 as a member of Gary Burton's Quartet. Now as a 45-year-old master, he continues to represent the highest possible musical standard of excellence with each release, with each solo, and at his best, with each note. As the century ends and a new millennium begins, TRIO 99>00 is an exciting documentation of one of the world's most important jazz musicians. The implications of this music, with its deep insight into "the tradition" in all its manifestations, combined with the timeless yet forward-thinking clarity that is watermarked into virtually all of Metheny's work to date, bode well for the safe passage of jazz from this century to the next.
