By Marcel Yammouni
Twenty-time Grammy Award-winning jazz guitar legend Pat Metheny will play an Australian exclusive performance at Vivid LIVE at Sydney Opera House.
For the first time in over a decade, the Kansas City-born virtuoso will return to the Concert Hall on Sunday 1 June, performing solo and showcasing music from his illustrious 50-year career, including selections from his recent albums MoonDial (2024) and Dream Box (2023).
Metheny, widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative guitarists of all time, is celebrated for his boundary-pushing blend of jazz, Brazilian, rock, funk and global sounds. His extraordinary journey includes collaborations with legends like Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Joni Mitchell and David Bowie, as well as chart-topping albums such as Still Life (Talking) (1987), Letter from Home (1989) and Secret Story (1992). His radical, genre-defying work continues to inspire and shape the music landscape, with recent works like Zero Tolerance for Silence hailed as groundbreaking.
Ahead of his Vivid LIVE performance, Melbourne based composer, guitarist Marcel Yammouni put forward some questions for Pat Metheny to ponder.
Marcel: Interviewing Pat Metheny is a real honour, especially given his immense impact on the world of jazz and experimental music. His fearless creativity has always pushed the boundaries of what’s possible, making him a true pioneer. Funny enough, I had planned to catch his performance at the iconic Sydney Opera House with my partner, but we couldn’t make it due to a scheduling conflict. It feels like a twist of fate that I now get to dive into his thoughts and insights through this interview. Let’s explore what makes this musical genius tick!
What inspired the sound and concept of MoonDial. Were there any particular experiences or influences that shaped the album?
Let me put in the context of the presentation that I so happy to be bringing down there. This has been really been an incredible tour so far – and I am really excited to be able to bring it to Australia. It’s been something unlike anything I’ve ever done before – and whenever possible, that is the zone I like to be in.
Even though the billing invokes the two recent recordings (Dream Box and MoonDial), both very different kinds of solo records, but this is a setting where I can reflect all of the other earlier different solo records as well, and the ways that I have played in a solo capacity across the years. That turns out to be quite a wide ranging realm of possibility for me in a single evening of music.
I am almost 200 performances in so far, and what I didn’t expect is that this has turned into one of my favorite playing situations. Every night I can get to a different type of a place, but at the same time since it’s just me sitting there, there’s a certain kind of freedom that I have never experienced before.
What has been especially cool is the audience reaction to everything. There’s quite a bit of variety in at all and it makes for a very different kind of presentation than any previous touring environment for me.
Balancing Composition and Improvisation
How do you balance composition and improvisation in your work, and how does that come through in your live performances?
Originally, I came to composing as a way of expanding my reach as an improviser. It was a way to set up environments for myself to hopefully get to the kinds of playing that I was hearing and that had been eluding me while playing standards or blues forms or the music of other composers.
Improvising and composing are related activities that happen at wildly different temperatures. Improvising on stage night after night with great musicians is about as hot an environment as there is in music, while sitting in a room alone pondering the merits of a Bb over an Ab for a week can represent an almost glacial pace of musical decision making. But at the same time, ideally the kinds of things that I love as a listener and a music lover are what I aspire to represent, regardless of how they come to be.As the years go on, the compositional side of things has evolved to be at least as important as the improvising side of things and offers a future that is quite different from the transient once-in-a-lifetime nature of improvising. I feel very privileged to be able to explore music from all of these various angles.
Performance Setup
How do you approach translating the intricate soundscapes of MoonDial to a live setting—especially in a venue like the Sydney Opera House?
Since MoonDial is totally a solo guitar record, it translates directly to live performance. The Opera House will be an excellent place sonically for that instrument. And there are many other elements of what my thing is that will be represented in the program there – a lot of different things that happen.
Collaboration with Linda Manzer
Your collaboration with Linda Manzer produced iconic instruments like the Pikasso guitar. How did that relationship influence your sound and creative process?
Linda has been one of my most important collaborators over many years now. Her skill as a luthier is unmatched, but beyond that, she is always interested in pushing what her instruments might be. I can give her a general idea and she can turn into something real that is always far beyond what I might have ever imagined.
Musical Evolution
You’ve explored so many musical directions over the years. How do you keep pushing your boundaries and evolving your sound?
Music is infinite for me. I really just try to honestly represent in sound the things I love about music.
I am not a huge fan of the whole idea of “genre” or styles of music kind of to start with. To me, music is one big universal thing. The musicians who 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. When it is a musician who can do that on the spot, as an improviser, that is usually my favorite kind of player.
I feel like I am a musician in this broad sense first. And all the subsets of the way music often gets talked about in terms of the words people use to describe music is basically just a cultural/political discussion that I have found that I am really not that interested in in the same way I am interested in the spirit and sound of music itself.
As far as sound goes, I always try to let the music at hand decide what direction I go in in terms of orchestration. I am pretty happy to play in a really dense way, or a really sparse way, or really loud or really soft or all over the dynamic range, really inside the chords or outside the chords – it kind of doesn’t matter too much for me – it is whatever seems to sound best for what is happening at that particular moment.
Plans While in Australia
Outside of music, is there anything you’re hoping to do while you’re in Australia? Maybe something in Sydney you haven’t had the chance to explore yet, or a place you’re looking forward to revisiting?
When I am out playing concerts, it is a full time thing for me. I spend every minute either preparing for the next concert, or resting up so I can do my best on the bandstand. Across the years I have had the occasional day off here and there, including in Sydney, and sometimes I do get a chance to go look around a bit, but I am not really able to really be a tourist much while on the road. One day I hope to come to Australia as a civilian and really visit.
https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/vivid-live/pat-metheny
Also our interviewer Marcel Yammouni has a fabulous new instrumental single, Hazel’ out now on Bandcamp