Pat Metheny at Town Hall, NYC

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March 20, 2008

Small Group, Big Sound

By NATE CHINEN, NY Times

Pat Metheny has cultivated an extraordinarily broad musical terrain over the last 30 years, exerting substantial influence in the process: as a guitarist, as a composer and conceptualist, as a champion crossbreeder. His most steadfast outlet is the Pat Metheny Group, an electro-acoustic ensemble that sheds a generous warmth and illumination; his most explicitly jazz-based outlet is the guitar-bass-drums trio, which projects more of a tight, focused beam.

That’s the standard line, anyway, bolstered by recorded evidence and the consensus of a dedicated fan base. But Mr. Metheny’s sold-out trio concert on Tuesday night at Town Hall was hardly a sparse proposition. Its reach was maximal, from the tiniest gesture to the most emphatic. And its impact was serious: Mr. Metheny’s trio was playing jazz, the genuine article, with the same nuclear intensity he brings to his barnstorming Pat Metheny Group tours.

The evening began in quietude, with Mr. Metheny taking the stage alone with his baritone acoustic guitar. He tolled a sequence of major chords, thoughtfully voiced and lightly annotated with arpeggios, before moving into the realm of one of his more recent compositions, “Make Peace.” There was marvelous concentration in his playing and an orchestral fullness to his sound, emphasized by the rich amplification of his lower strings.

He offered a few more songs in this solo format, one of which, “The Sound of Water,” featured his harplike 42-string Pikasso guitar. Each of these performances — and his solo introduction, later in the show, to “Is This America? (Katrina 2005)” — conveyed the message that intensity can take the form of a whisper as well as a roar.

The greater portion of the concert featured Christian McBride on acoustic bass and Antonio Sanchez on drums, and skirted the edge of musical catharsis. Mr. Metheny has worked with these musicians on and off for years — their brilliant new studio album, “Day Trip” (Nonesuch), was recorded in a single day in 2005 — and their rapport has strengthened and deepened. Tuesday marked both a homecoming and the end of their latest long excursion, which accounted for the climactic tone.

Mr. Metheny improvised throughout with passion and erudition, combining mercurial fretboard runs with more limpid, searching phrases. And he gave his partners equal say. Mr. McBride nailed the lightning-bolt melody of “Let’s Move”; he swaggered through a potent solo on “Calvin’s Keys,” the sort of blues shuffle he eats for breakfast. Mr. Sanchez fashioned several technically dazzling and thematically sound solos of his own, closing the show with his strongest, on the up-tempo samba “Lone Jack.”

That song, from the Pat Metheny Group archives, received a welcoming cheer. A more moderate version of the same response greeted “Police People,” a searing jangle from Mr. Metheny’s sessions with the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman; “The Bat,” a requiem for one of Mr. Coleman’s contemporaries, the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman; and “When We Were Free,” a modal waltz from the Pat Metheny Group book that was repurposed for the new album.

For an encore Mr. Metheny and his band mates plugged in and pushed toward head-spinning prog-rock, all torque and distortion. It was like a shot of espresso after a harmonious meal: jarring yet bracing, and naturally part of the whole.