Twelve years and a month ago, I went to see Pat Metheny’s “Unity Group” twice in two nights, noting that “Pat is a far, far better guitar player than he was in 2005, or 1994, or 1977. We don't want to think about that for some reason; we like to think of talented people as kind of springing from the ground, not improving over time as a consequence of dedicated effort. Don't get me wrong. He was obviously brilliant in 1977, but now he's so much faster and has so many more ideas it's like he's a different person.”
Now, in retrospect, it’s obvious: that was the moment where, as the man once said, the wave broke, and rolled back.
First things first: the “Side Eye” format under which Pat has been touring for the past five or six years is trash. I’ll just recap my own comment from 2021:
If Pat wants to turn into some kind of late-stage capitalist Castro fanatic who charges $75 a night to watch him noodle chromatic scales in the company of lazy "young lions" whose ability to play "Sirabhorn" is considerably below that of my twelve-year-old son, it's his call --- but I'm not going to support it with my Biden-era dollar.
Last night’s ticket to Newark, Ohio’s Midland theatre was $108 with all fees. Which is sadly about the same price, really, that $75 was in 2021. That got me, The Commander, and MDG just four rows from the stage. For the record, it was my son’s idea to go see Pat, not mine, and I can’t blame him. He wanted to see Pat play for the same reason I dragged him to Birdland a few years back to see Ron Carter, and for the same reason I’ll probably drag him to see Lee Ritenour in the near future: at some point, these cats will stop playing and if you don’t see them now it might never happen.
This was a better gig than previous “Side Eyes” because there was no music on the bandstand. Everyone knew the tunes. Also, Pat now has four sidemen, not two. I will now rank them in decreasing order of my willingness to feed them into a woodchipper:
Chris Fishman, keys: I’m sure he is a lovely person but I have never heard a keyboard player whose work I enjoyed less. He had a grand piano, two Nords, an ASM Leviasynth, and a Moog, which was annoyingly configured to sound exactly like Metheny’s Roland guitar synth. I feel for the guy because who would want to replace Lyle Mays — but at the same time, I disliked his playing, his soloing, his absurd and tone-deaf approach to synth sound and volume control, and his face, which is far too self-satisfied for someone who struggles to even approach Lyle’s solo work.
Jermaine Paul, bass: Nice sense of timing, enthusiastic solo work, but he struggles with intonation up the neck and his electric bass playing, which was limited to just a few tunes, is not worth emulating or even hearing. He’s a better upright player than Steve Rodby, but that’s like saying he’s better-looking than Wallace Shawn.
Joe Dyson, drums: I think Paul Wertico, who backed Metheny for his “Geffen” years, was a pretty good drummer and Antonio Sanchez, who replaced Wertico, was an inhuman drummer. Joe is closer to Wertico than Sanchez but he is a likable performer. He enjoys what he does. The drums sound alive when he plays them. And he did a good job of filling the spaces that Jermaine Paul kept leaving with his occasionally sleepy lines.
Leonard Patton, vocals: Pat Metheny has spent the last forty-six years convincing brilliant multi-instrumentalists to stand behind him and sing nonsense syllables. Pedro Aznar, Mark Ledford, Richard Bona… and now you can add Leonard Patton to this list. What a joy it was to watch him sing “The First Circle”. He’s not young and he doesn’t have the power of a golden-era Pedro Aznar but man, can he put emotion into a tune. I would be delighted to see him play a gig without Metheny. Fully recommended.
Patton’s performance on the aforementioned “The First Circle” performance was probably the highlight of a show generally marked by disappointments. At fifty-nine, Metheny played guitar with the energy of a teenager. At seventy-one, he does not. He limped onto the stage in a way that made me, a fellow and frequent limper, feel deeply sorry for him. His hand positioning and body language betrays constant pain. He simply can’t play guitar the way he used to and his solo language has lost about 75% of its vocabulary; when he was obviously hurting he would resort to a series of octave climbs that let him stretch his left hand out and play slower. For the first time in the thirty-five years I’ve been watching him play live, he played the electric guitar fingerstyle. Surely this was to reduce right hand pain; Metheny’s characteristic upside-down pick work is probably unpleasant for him to continue.
It has been seventeen years since Pat recorded an album of first-rate original music (Orchestrion, the tour for which marked a personal low point in my morally vacant wife-banging existence) and the new Side Eye tunes do not reverse this trend, they’re simply worthless, they’re aimless noodles with no defined beginning or end. The truth of the matter is that it’s been all downhill since Secret Story, which is now thirty-four years in the past, but dedicated Metheny fans have long endured a tacit bargain with the man in which we agree to spend half the concert listening to free-form tuneless chromatic lines in exchange for seventy-five glorious minutes of “Bright Size Life” or “Have You Heard”.
The Commander noted, to his annoyance, that when Metheny deigned to play his old tunes he played them “outside” to the point that they were often hard to even recognize. This might be gratifying for the average 70-year-old Metheny fan, examples of which made up the bulk of the audience, but for a 17-year-old musician who is experiencing the ECM and Geffen records now for the first time, it has to be a a real drag to watch Pat fold, spindle, and mutilate “Round Trip/Broadway Blues” into a VG-8-distortion/pick-scratch musical abortion played on… an acoustic with a hidden hex-digital pickup, maybe?
“Well, at least you got to see him live,” I offered. “This has to be the end of his performing career, or nearly so.”
For me, the final straw was the encore. Which was “Are You Going With Me?” and that should normally be the very definition of red meat to Metheny nerds. Out of respect to Lyle, however, or maybe just because it would have been painful for him to play the original guitar part, Metheny covered Lyle’s line on the guitar while Chris Fishman’s useless ass comped at whisper-low levels. Then, when it was time for the Roland guitar solo, Pat played… not a traditional Metheny guitar-synth solo, but more of a Ibanez hollow-body solo on the Roland. We have had forty-seven years of “Are You Going With Me?” being defined by multiple fast runs up the fretboard (like this, if you don’t know what I mean, listen for about 60 seconds) but Pat can’t do that now, he tried it once and barely got it, so he did other stuff.
Which would be like Wes Montgomery not playing octaves or something. Or Eddie Van Halen refusing to tap.
I’m glad my kids got to see Pat play. It wasn’t nearly as shambolic a performance as, say, most of Bob Dylan’s tours since George W. Bush got elected. But I wish I’d been able to take them all the way back to the “We Live Here” tour. To see Pat at the top of his compositional form, with first-rate sidemen and enough energy for three hours of serious work. This wasn’t that. And it really would be too much to expect of a man who is tired and possibly sick, whose primary collaborator is years cold in the grave, whose audience is largely old enough to be either collecting Social Security or desperately anticipating it. But here’s the problem: after Pat, there is no one. There are no young jazz guitarists, no heirs to the fusion throne, no one writing and performing at this level. Norman Brown has already laid off writing new music at the age of 55. Nat Janoff disappeared. Who is left? Cory Wong?
I am glad we went. We will not be going back.