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Improvisational Theater
Making up melodies with guitar great Pat Metheny.
By Ed Hazell
Berklee.edu Correspondent
January 23, 2003
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Photo by Justin A. Knight |
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Pat Metheny certainly doesn't look his age. At 48, he's still trim, his face is wreathed in curly brown hair, and he beams a boyish smile when he laughs. But if his looks are deceptive, then his words betray his years. His answers to student questions about improvisation at a workshop at the Berklee Performance Center last month revealed the wisdom that only years of experience in music can bring. In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session, he spoke on many facets of the improviser's art—leading bands, improvising melody, and the necessity of both education and performing for growth as an artist.
Since first gaining international attention in 1974 at the age of 19 in the quartet of Executive Vice President Gary Burton, Metheny has gone on to create some of the most popular jazz of the past 25 years. Starting with 1978's Pat Metheny Group, his attractive upbeat music, which draws on rock, folk, and Brazilian music, was both commercially successful and artistically challenging. He has also worked with an impressively eclectic range of improvisers, including avant-gardists such as Ornette Coleman and Derek Bailey, as well as hard bop mainstream jazz players such as Herbie Hancock, Roy Haynes, and Michael Brecker.
A Berklee faculty member in the early 1970s, Metheny returned to Berklee in December for a weeklong residency as the third Herb Albert Visiting Professor (Bassist Abe Laboriel and composer/arranger Alan Broadbent are the other two Alpert professors). In addition to concerts and guitar workshops, Metheny fielded questions about improvisation from a student audience that filled two-thirds of the BPC.
In response to the first question, Metheny explained what inspired him to start composing and leading a band.
"There was a way that I wanted to play as an improviser that I was unable to uncover on blues, standards, or even free," Metheny said. "There was a sound I wanted to achieve, a way of participating in a musical community, that I had no sense existed at the time I came along."
He said that pop music influenced his musical development as much as jazz. "By that I mean really thinking about the presentation of the music," he said. "How it would actually sound to an audience. And that also connected to the way I wanted to improvise. I didn't want to play so much in the jazz language; I was looking for more. That was the key motivational factor for me in writing, in band leading, and particularly in improvising."
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| Metheny's improvisation clinic was one of two talks he held in the Berklee Performance Center. |
| Photo by Justin A. Knight |
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He later talked about keeping a narrative flow going as an important factor in the way of improvising he was in search of. "I'm interested in the evolution of narrative improvisation. Narrative improvisation is more about what sounds good over the course of an hour or two-hour performance. Keeping things moving along a narrative line usually means shifting, changing, trading off, trying to explore all the little things you can do together, and trying to avoid doing the same thing over and over again.
"Thinking in longer ideas is much easier than thinking in shorter ones," Metheny continued. "To use an analogy to speech, it's very difficult to talk about 40 different subjects in 40 different sentences. It's much easier to keep talking about one thing until you've exhausted what you have to say about it. To me, it's just easier to keep one idea going."
When a student asked him what was the common denominator among the many different musicians with whom he's played, Metheny said it all came down to one thing—melody.
"Playing on chord changes, not on chord changes. Structured, not structured. Those considerations became much less important to me than the sense of melody," Metheny said. "The sense of making melody that goes beyond the obvious is my link to those records."
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Metheny (right) held several impromptu sessions for students throughout his week on campus. |
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Photo by Justin A. Knight |
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Metheny said that a solid grounding in musical fundamentals was also essential, no matter what kind of music you want to play.
"There may be people here who resent the fact that chords scales and other aspects of the jazz language are somewhat forced down your throat," he said. "However, I'm an enthusiastic advocate of learning all this stuff. It's worth the effort. It will pay off endlessly in multifaceted ways for the rest of your life.
"In my case, I didn't learn it the way you are. I didn't know any of that stuff until I got in Gary Burton's band. But I found from that experience and my experience teaching here, that it's not only valuable as a jazz tool, but it's valuable as a window into all music. All other ways of thinking about harmony are really bulky compared to the language that you are learning here. But after acknowledging that, there was a point for me where a door opened and I thought, 'Wait, these are not scales at all; they're just ways of codifying these sounds.'"
In the end, Metheny said, all the time spent learning about harmony and other principles matters most in the moments when musicians perform in public.
"My feeling is that playing gigs is so incredibly important to your musical development that even if it's a crummy gig, it's worth doing. There's something about playing live that is so essential to development that I would say that a real live playing situation is still the key, especially if you are doing it with people who are better than you are. There's just something about having people there that makes you play differently. When I started a band, we played every place we could play for many years, for very little bread. Not only to present our music, but to learn about music and grow as musicians."
Ed Hazell is a freelance jazz writer whose work appears in the Boston Phoenix, Jazziz, Berklee Today, and other magazines. He is the author of Berklee: The First 50 Years.
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