Jazz Articles about Pat Metheny

Mai Jazz 2014

by John Kelman
May 24, 2014

Mai Jazz 2014 Stavanger, Norway May 6-11, 2014 After visiting Norway as often as four or five times annually, a first trip to the country in early May is surprisingly late for a first visit of the year. The last time visiting the west coast city of Stavanger was in 2008, part of the annual JazzNorway in a Nutshell event that brought international guests from around the globe to sample Norwegian culture but, most importantly, the ...

Pat Metheny Unity Group: Kin (<-->)

by Doug Collette
April 15, 2014

Pat Metheny's Unity Group is perfectly named because, in its quintet lineup even more so than the original quartet, the group's approach brings together every musical element the famed guitarist has pursued during the course of his career. Acoustic guitars of the solo projects, dense high-tech arrangements à la Pat Metheny Group, traditional jazz horns recalling 80/81 (ECM, 1980) and vigorous ensemble improvisation hearkening to his various trios all mix on Kin ()'s very first track, “On Day One," and ...

by Ian Patterson
April 9, 2014

Nine years after the Pat Metheny Group crowned its mammoth The Way Up (Nonesuch, 2005) tour before 100,000 people at the Montreal Jazz Festival, it seems increasingly unlikely that Metheny will reconvene his main vehicle, not now with a vibrant new group pushing him compositionally and slaying audiences. Or does it? In a 2012 interview with All About Jazz , drummer Antonio Sanchez--who has worked closely with Metheny for a dozen years--said of the PMG: “everybody is craving another go ...

Pat Metheny Unity Group at the Paramount Theater, Denver, March 7, 2014

by Geoff Anderson
March 11, 2014

Pat Metheny Unity Group Paramount Theater Denver, CO March 7, 2014 The Group is back. Sort of. For virtually his entire career, Pat Metheny has bounced back and forth between the highly successful Pat Metheny Group and a wide array of projects under his own name. Ever since the Group's eponymous 1978 release, the personnel in the Pat Metheny Group constantly evolved. Besides Metheny, however, one player remained constant: keyboard player Lyle Mays; i.e.: no ...

Pat Metheny Unity Group: Kin (←→)

by John Kelman
January 28, 2014

Strangely enough, the release of Kin () may be the one that most polarizes longtime fans of guitarist Pat Metheny. There are those who feel that, beginning with 2005's last recording with his then-longstanding Pat Metheny Group, that he'd become too complex, too chops-heavy and too distanced from the accessible music of recordings like Travels (ECM, 1983) and Still Life (Talking) (Nonesuch, 1987). He further distanced himself from a number of his core constituents with Orchestrion (Nonesuch, 2010), and his ...

Crown of the Continent Guitar Festival 2013

by Mark Holston
September 4, 2013

Crown of the Continent Guitar FestivalBigfork, MontanaAugust 26-31, 2013“Either I'm imaging things, or this festival has grown just a little in the four years since I was here last," Pat Metheny laughed as he squinted into the glare of a brace of theater lights. An SRO crowd of over 900 ecstatic fans crammed into a high-arching, rectangular tent fit for an emir's wedding hooted and clapped in response. The guitar icon's telling comments during his recent concert ...

Down Pat

by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
August 12, 2013

It has been said of Pat Metheny that if Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, and Charlie Christian had somehow all been involved in fathering a single child, that child would grow up to be pursuing her master's in developmental psychology at Stanford while working as an assistant manager at Border's. Where they sell Pat Metheny CD's. How ironic is that? Not ironic enough, according to Microsoft Word's irony check, which rated this paragraph as only 34.7% as ironic as it could ...