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Spinning Yarns
Guitarist Pat Metheny and the art of a good tale.
By Rob Ruffin '01
Berklee.edu Correspondent
January 28, 2003
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| Pat Metheny takes a solo during a concert at the end of his weeklong residency. |
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| Photo by Farnsworth/Blalock |
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When several hundred guitarists gathering for a workshop on playing their instrument last month realized that their lecturer was spending much of his time talking about storytelling, some of them might have considered leaving for a moment. But acclaimed guitarist, composer, and former faculty member Pat Metheny was doing the talking, and those same guitarists were transfixed by his words, looking for plot connections, hints of characterization, and clues about how the whole thing would turn out.
One of the biggest questions on everyone's mind was about the guitar case he carried on stage at the beginning of the clinic. What kind of guitar did he have in there? What tune will he play? Will he even take the guitar out of the case?
Right from Metheny's opening invitation for questions, he placed narrative at the center, urging audience members to make their questions follow each other with some sense of connectedness, as if he wanted them to participate in the story of this clinic as much he did.
"Keep a flow going and kind of pick up where the other guy left off," said Metheny, whose guitar clinic was the first college-wide event in a weeklong residency as part of his stint as a Herb Alpert Visiting Professor.
For the next 75 minutes, Metheny responded to questions from the Berklee community, returning frequently to the idea of narrative improvisation, or the telling of a story with a beginning, middle, and end through extemporaneous musical creation. Metheny, a master of narrative improvisation himself, also gave a chronology of his life and musical development, beginning with a youthful obsession with music during his childhood in Lee's Summit, Missouri.
When asked about finding his musical voice, Metheny said that he was playing trumpet at the age of eight when he heard the Beatles, who inspired him to play guitar. But it wasn't long before he found inspiration in other musicians.
"When I finally got a guitar, my first thing was to want to play in a rock band, which I did for a couple of months," Metheny said. "But my brother brought home a Miles Davis album at about that time. The record was called Four and More, and within about ten seconds after I dropped the needle on that record my life was a different life...The whole idea of people improvising at that level with that fluency was so infinitely fascinating to me that it was worth it to me to spend literally every waking moment trying to understand what that was.
"There was a fine line in my parents' minds between what I was doing and severe mental illness," he continued. "They were quite concerned probably like many of your parents were at the point you got devotedly interested in music.”
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Metheny will return to Berklee in 2003 for the second of three visits as a Herb Alpert visiting professor. |
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Photo by Justin A. Knight |
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From the beginning Metheny admired musicians that created "something so personal that it was universal." The musician that most captivated Metheny when he was between the ages of 12 and 19 was Wes Montgomery. He played every song like Montgomery—starting with single notes, progressing to octaves, and ending with chords. He also listed the recordings of John Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, and Charlie Parker as major influences on his musical beginnings.
Not only did Metheny listen to his musical elders on vinyl, he played with some older jazz musicians as a teenager, during trips he made to nearby Kansas City. He talked about how lucky he felt to have worked with more experienced players, and appreciated being challenged by them to do more than just imitate Wes Montgomery. Metheny explained that he didn't so much practice as prepare for the gigs that he was playing at a young age, and that fear of embarrassment was a major motivator for a kid playing gigs with adults.
Another major period of Metheny's development unfolded when he joined Gary Burton's quartet. It was during those years, in the mid-1970s, that Metheny became obsessed with the idea of telling stories through music.
"That whole idea of making a narrative analogy between storytelling—thinking in sentences and phrases with linear improvisation—has always been fascinating to me and I feel very lucky that I was able to be around a number of players that were masters of it," Metheny said. "The time that I spent in Gary Burton's band was an unbelievable intense conversion into the highest possible standards you can imagine in that area...To have the experience to play my little thing and then hear (Professor of Guitar) Mick (Goodrick) play on basically the same tune and think, 'Oh, okay. That's how you do it.'"
At the end of the clinic, Metheny left the stage with his guitar still in its case. With the dramatic tension building toward his duo performance with Mick Goodrick on the following night, it was clear that this first public appearance of his weeklong residency was only the beginning of the story he intended to tell.
Rob Ruffin graduated from Berklee in 2001 with a degree in Performance. He is a jazz guitarist, composer, and Guitar Department assistant administrator.
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