Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Piazza Unita / Tarvisio / Italy
Concert date: July 22, 2010
Attendance: 1,000
Ticket price: €45.00
“The Song Book” is the name of the tour that has brought American jazz fusion outfit Pat Metheny Group back to Europe! Since cloning is still too pricey an investment for mere mortals, I had to skip the band’s Ljubljana show at Križanke on June 29, 2010! Pat Metheny Group’s gig overlapped with Megadeth playing Kino Šiška. It really is hell when your taste in music is this wide. Luckily, there’s Tarvisio! Trbiž, if you’re Slovenian, just past the Podkoren ski resort, 10 km beyond Kranjska Gora. Already in Italy. This year the local annual “No Borders Music festival” lined up some seriously interesting names, and the first of them, kicking off the summer concert buzz in this lovely little Alpine tourist town, was none other than Pat Metheny Group.
That said, for this tour Pat Metheny Group has been cut down to a quartet. When I saw them in Ljubljana in 1991, there were 7 members on stage. This time they showed up without extra vocalists – so no vocal harmonies, and no percussion, accordion, woodwinds and whatever else they used to have. So what we got this time was a bare instrumental run through the material. As a result, some of the tunes, especially from the albums “A Letter From Home” and “Still Life (Talking)”, sounded less juicy and full on stage. Mostly because the rhythmic feel, which on those records borrows heavily from traditional Brazilian folk elements, couldn’t be replicated by a quartet with the same tightness as the studio versions. When we’re talking jazz, that’s not a good sign. Jazz is music that has to come alive in full glory at every single stage performance!
However I look at it, there was once again no arguing with the work of a quartet of top-class musicians: Pat Metheny (guitar), his inseparable musical partner Lyle Mays (keyboards), bassist Steve Rodby and drummer Antonio Sanchez. Talent and professionalism are so deeply woven into this long-running collaboration and experience that a mistake in the middle of a show would be a real jackpot-level rarity!
The concert started at 9:20 p.m.! Right with the opener from the 1977 studio debut “Pat Metheny”, Phase Dance. In the first part the guys delivered an excellent version of the “mega-hit” This Is Not America, in a strictly jazzy manner all their own, of course. It’s a tune you probably all know from David Bowie’s version, written by Lyle Mays and Pat Metheny. In concert, Pat Metheny Group built it around creating a lofty atmosphere. They played it with incredible softness. Metheny’s recognizable guitar sound was woven almost unnoticeably into the layered harmonizing of Mays’s keyboards, which took the absolute lead in the piece.
That wasn’t the only moment like that. Even more intensely, in raising that dreamy, high-flying atmosphere, The Bat stood out in the set, with the stage flooded in dark purple light, along with one of the band’s best-known tunes, Are You Going With Me?. In the latter Metheny grabbed hold of his famous synth-bent guitar sound, against the usual lush backdrop of Mays’s keyboards. By far the most thunderous ovations among the atmospheric numbers went to Last Train Home (“Still Life Talking”, 1987), where Metheny picked up an electric sitar. Sanchez’s opening brush work on the snare was all it took for people to recognize the song instantly and fire off wave after wave of cheering, again and again. Pat knows too that Last Train Home is something you just can’t skip whenever Pat Metheny Group takes the stage.
It was also nice to hear James from the excellent album “Offramp” (1983). To The End Of The World was the moment of the show where Pat wanted a bit more room for musical expression! So he sent the other three comrades backstage for tea and took the Pikasso guitar in hand himself! This famous musical marvel, a regular at Metheny’s concerts, is shaped like some kind of cross between a lute, a harp and a folk guitar, and Pat of course uses the body of the instrument too, for dictating the tempo.
Worth singling out too is the performance of When We Were Free (Pat Metheny Group, “Quartet”, 1996), where the highly melodic, easy-to-listen-to opening section follows fairly predictable organic collages of typical Metheny melos, then gets turned completely on its head in the second part when Pat grabs the electric guitar and the main theme of the tune gets a noisy, cranked-up character. The quartet masterfully “broke up” the tune in the closing section, damn well “dramatized” it and flipped the mood upside down! The mischievous and sparkling Lone Jack from the debut then closed out the regular set.
Pat Metheny Group came back for the first encore and the show continued in the spirit of the excellent album “Still Life (Talking)” and its opener Minuano (Six Eight). Here again I missed the vocal harmonies and the extra percussion that would have underlined the rhythmic framework. After thunderous applause that just wouldn’t die down, the band said goodnight, but came back out once more and in the second encore rattled off Song For Bilbao as well.
Even after the two full hours the concert ran, people simply didn’t want to leave the venue. There seemed to be no end to the applause, the ovations and the calls for the band to come back on stage. But the group never returned. Pat Metheny proved once again that he’s a guitar wizard who, with his utterly unique and singular approach, enjoys high standing and respect among connoisseurs of contemporary jazz. The partnership with Lyle Mays is magical, and the two musicians read each other phenomenally in their stage dialogue. The show was played without an audible flaw. The sound was brilliant, and the ambience of Piazza Unita in the middle of Tarvisio’s town center was more than ideal for enjoying this kind of music. Two hours of concert is a rarity today, and in Pat Metheny’s recognizable jazz folk fusion manner, with the bravura Sanchez-Rodby rhythm section (Rodby played the whole show on upright bass), in which Sanchez, with just two short solo spots, thoroughly fired up the audience, there wasn’t a single moment that showed even a hint of weakness.
Although we could truly enjoy yet another magical evening of music, it became more than obvious that even Metheny is pinching pennies. Making a living in the music industry is getting harder and harder these days. So first Metheny cut the number of band members for the tour, and Lyle Mays is no longer surrounded by keyboards like he used to be, but has them stacked just in front of him, on two stands. Even the classic piano that stood on stage, and the main PA, plus the drums, belonged to the “backline”. That’s how bands save money these days. So I can conclude that, compared with the Tarvisio experience, the 1991 Ljubljana concert at Križanke, which we witnessed three days before Slovenia split from Yugoslavia, is still number one! Sadly I don’t know how the band’s Ljubljana show on June 29, 2010 went, but I hear Križanke was packed to the rafters. In Tarvisio, though, Pat Metheny was extremely tight-lipped. The quartet communicated with the audience entirely through playing the material. And that was enough.
When I think back to the band’s 1991 show at Križanke, I can’t possibly forget Pat’s words that night, in a one-of-a-kind address that catapulted the Ljubljana crowd straight to heaven: “I’ve heard that you are making a new state here in a couple of days! I wish you good luck!”
Almost 20 years have passed since! You get less and less flexible, harder to adapt, and it gets easier to “buy your freedom” (if you’ve got the money, of course), or rather to secure safety and control. So I can’t ignore the fact that, after bitter experiences at the Jethro Tull (Graz, July 1, 2010, Austria) and Jeff Beck (St. Veit a.d. Glan, July 9, 2010, Austria) concerts, I was forced, for the third time this July, to shoot photos all sweaty from 100 m away from the stage, at the mixing desk. Obviously there’ll be more and more of this in the future too. Hey! Anyone got money for a telephoto lens and a tripod for me?
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1.Phase Dance 2.Have You Heard 3.Jaco 4.This Is Not America 5.Better Days Ahead 6.The Bat 7.Proof 8.James 9.Are You Going With Me? 10.Farmer’s Trust 11.It’s Just Talk 12.Last Train Home 13.To The End Of The World 14.When We Were Free 15.Lone Jack —encore I.— 16.Minuano —encore II.— 17. Song For Bilbao
Photo gallery
