The Emergence of the Rural American Ideal in Jazz

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The Emergence of the Rural AmericanIdeal in Jazz: Keith Jarrett and PatMetheny on ECM RecordsDavid AkePublished online: 12 Jan 2007.

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The Emergence of the Rural AmericanIdeal in Jazz: Keith Jarrett and PatMetheny on ECM RecordsDavid Ake

Jazz has long been identified as an urban genre. Certainly, the standard historical

narratives trace a metropolitan lineage: New Orleans to Chicago to Kansas City to

New York, with other cities inside and outside the United States playing somewhat

lesser roles. Scholars and laypersons alike have understood jazz as not only presented

primarily in urban areas, but also as among the foremost aural representations of city

living.1 Dozens of jazz-related song and album titles support these understandings.

Such titles memorialize a favorite municipality (Ornette Coleman’s New York Is

Now), neighborhood (Harlem in ‘‘Take the A Train’’), thoroughfare (‘‘Central

Avenue Breakdown’’), or cultural landmark (‘‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’’). This is not to

say that less-populated areas have not contributed. Many well-known players—

including some discussed below—hailed from small-town and rural America.

However, all of these jazz musicians eventually moved to and made their names in

one city or another. In each case, the urban environment offered the promise of

increased professional opportunities and a heightened sense of energy and

excitement.

Using such historical contexts as a backdrop, this paper addresses the emergence of

a decidedly different geo-cultural milieu for jazz, one that, while sometimes

physically composed, performed, or distributed in cities, evokes various idealized

visions of an America far from the bustle and hum of the metropolis. Of course,

practitioners in the United States of folk, country, and some blues styles have long

extolled the virtues of rural or untamed spaces. Likewise, European and American

composers of Western art music have an equally established tradition of evoking

pastoral imagery and nature (real or imagined). As musicologist Richard Leppert has

shown, many of these musicians—and his list includes Beethoven, Schubert, and

Wagner, as well as a host of others—valorized ‘‘nature, increasingly placed in binary

opposition to culture.’’2 Yet, while a rural ideal in these genres may be fairly

1 For example, the promotional copy to Leroy Ostransky’s book, Jazz City, claims that ‘‘jazz, a

phenomenon intricately bound up with the history of America, is a musical reflection of the growth of

our cities.’’ From the back cover of Leroy Ostransky, Jazz City: The Impact of Our Cities on the

Development of Jazz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978).2 Richard Leppert, ‘‘Paradise, Nature, and Reconciliation, or a Tentative Conversation with Wagner,

Puccini, Adorno, and the Ronettes,’’ Echo 4.1 (Spring 2002), http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume4-

Issue1/leppert/leppert3.html (accessed August 10, 2006).

Jazz PerspectivesVol. 1, No. 1, May 2007, pp. 29–59

ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17494060601061014

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commonplace, even customary, jazz has been so closely linked to the city for so long

that a subgenre that suggests anything other than a cosmopolitan sophistication

seems contrary to expectations.

Non-urban approaches to jazz differentiate themselves from their city-based

cousins through evocative album cover images and programmatic titles, as well as a

palate of timbres, chord progressions, and rhythms that, perhaps inevitably, borrows

from country, folk, rock, and Euro-American art music. But the implications of this

trend go beyond mere sounds, pictures, and song names. Taken as a whole, this

music draws on and reinforces what musicologist Beth Levy has called ‘‘two of this

country’s most powerful national myths: the United States as a confederation

founded upon self-sufficient agricultural enterprise and America as the glorious

realization of westward expansion.’’3 More important, they shed light on a subgenre

of jazz that is unusual for being rooted as much (or more) in European-American

rural culture as in African American urban culture. Almost all of the musicians

discussed in this essay are white, and this fact plays a significant role in discerning

where this music ‘‘comes from’’ and to whom they may be speaking.

The jazz styles discussed below do not present a single, unified vision of a bucolic

America. Quite the contrary, in fact, they express and explore a broad range of styles

and attitudes. What unifies this body of music—and this is the point I want to

emphasize in this paper—is the shared idealization of non-urban spaces and lifestyles.

Such a profound shift in jazz’s location (if sometimes only an imagined location)

bears attention, as it hints at larger changes in participation and meaning as the

music heads into its second century.

An Unlikely ‘‘Fusion’’

From 2002 to 2004, Norah Jones’s CD Come Away with Me provided a seemingly

ubiquitous soundscape for patrons at Starbucks coffee houses and other upscale

emporiums around the United States. Both the disc’s lead single, ‘‘Don’t Know

Why,’’ and its title track each garnered extensive airplay. The album’s phenomenal

sales also catapulted Jones to the top of both Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz chart and

its Top 200 album chart.4 To be sure, commercial success for young, attractive,

breathy female singers of jazz-inflected popular music was nothing new. Cassandra

Wilson, Diana Krall, and Jane Monheit trod similar paths in the years immediately

preceding Jones’s triumph. What made Norah Jones’s case somewhat surprising,

however, was the inclusion of so many characteristics typically associated with

country music. These characteristics were most obvious in her rendition of Hank

3 Beth Levy, ‘‘‘The White Hope of American Music’: Or, How Roy Harris Became Western,’’ American

Music 19 (Summer 2001): 132.4 Norah Jones, Come Away with Me, Blue Note 32088, 2002, compact disc. This CD was released by jazz

stalwart Blue Note Records. The company notably described the music as ‘‘jazz informed.’’ Following its

release, the disc received extensive attention in DownBeat, JazzTimes, and other jazz-oriented

publications.

30 The Emergence of the Rural American Ideal in Jazz

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Williams’s ‘‘Cold, Cold Heart,’’ but related textures are also heard in the acoustic

guitar work and Floyd Kramer-like piano fills throughout her disc.5

Beyond the hybrid music of a small coterie of artists such as Bob Wills, David

Grisman, and a few others, the words ‘‘country’’ and ‘‘jazz’’ have rarely been uttered

in the same breath, least of all by members of the mainstream jazz contingent.6 For

decades, jazz performers, composers, critics, and fans have derided country music

and related genres as a sort of musical wasteland, or worse. For most proponents of

jazz, country hardly seems to be music at all, but rather simplistic pabulum by and

for dull, white ‘‘hicks.’’ As Richard Peterson noted in his book Creating Country

Music, city dwellers in the early decades of the twentieth century considered country

(then known as ‘‘hillbilly’’) music ‘‘the antithesis of their own aesthetic and

worldview because it evoked the image of rural poverty and small-town morality that

so many in the rapidly urbanizing American society were trying to escape.’’7 In these

ways, country represented the polar opposite of the worldliness of jazz. The degree to

which the aesthetics and understandings of jazz and country music have traditionally

diverged can be witnessed in Sonny Rollins’s 1957 release, Way Out West.8 As seen in

Figure 1, the cover of that album shows the saxophonist in the desert attired in a ten-

gallon hat and chaps, with a holster by his side (but no six shooter, as his saxophone

serves as his ‘‘weapon’’). Though perfectly natural for, say, a record by country singer

Gene Autry, such an illustration is clearly meant in this case as a tongue-in-cheek play

on racial and musical stereotypes.9 Beyond the self-conscious, cowboy-kitsch

5 In one way or another, each of these singers play with genre boundaries and stereotypes. Wilson

typically explores the terrain of acoustic blues, while Monheit and Krall traverse the more familiar (if

sometimes more blurry) line separating jazz from cabaret, pop, or Broadway.6 Thanks to Lewis Porter for reminding me of Buddy Rich’s famous joke that he [Rich] was ‘‘allergic to

nothing but country music.’’ Despite Rich and the many other antagonists, jazz musicians from all eras

of the music have at least toyed with country idioms. Perhaps the most intriguing early instance of jazz/

country collaboration was the July 1930 recording of ‘‘Blue Yodel No. 9,’’ which paired Jimmie Rodgers,

the ‘‘Father of Country Music,’’ with Louis Armstrong on trumpet and (most likely) Lil Armstrong on

piano. Jimmie Rodgers, ‘‘Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standin’ on a Corner),’’ Victor 23580, 1930, 78-rpm;

reissued on Jimmie Rodgers, On the Way Up, Rounder 1058, 1991, compact disc. Further examples

include guitarist Lenny Breau, who performed as ‘‘Lone Pine Junior’’ at twelve years of age with his

parents’ country band and later performed alongside Chet Atkins (Atkins himself was respected for his

jazz skills). Perhaps the most relevant figure for this study is vibraphonist Gary Burton who made records

as a young man alongside country musicians Hank Garland (also a fine jazz player), Boots Randolph,

and (again) Chet Atkins. Burton’s name will surface again in this essay. One might also be tempted to

cite Ray Charles’s 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western (ABC-Paramount 410, 1962, LP),

but by the time that record was released, Charles was widely recognized as an R&B singer. While Modern

Sounds certainly worked against racial/musical stereotypes, the geographic and/or cultural loci of the jazz

genre were not really in play.7 Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1997), 6.8 Sonny Rollins, Way Out West, Fantasy 7530, 1957, LP.9 William Claxton, photographer of the Rollins disc, claims that it was just this image that inspired Mel

Brooks to make his film Blazing Saddles (Warner Bros., 1974), which starred Cleavon Little in the

unlikely role of a black sheriff in an otherwise all-white Western town. See http://www.greatyarmouthlive.

com/news/t_section_info.php?page5William_Claxton_-_Legendary_Jazz_Photographer (accessed

August 10, 2006). Blazing Saddles also features an incongruous scene that involves the Count Basie

Orchestra playing ‘‘April in Paris’’ in the middle of the Western plains.

Jazz Perspectives 31

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references that result from acts like Rollins performing ‘‘I’m an Old Cowhand,’’ the

album makes very few musical allusions to rural musical topics. Yet, with Norah

Jones and her band, there it was: country and jazz brought together in the music itself

in an engaging and intelligent way. Moreover, this music was enjoyed by a broad

range of the listening public. And Jones was not the only instance of such blending in

the new millennium.

In a 2003 article for the ‘‘roots music’’ magazine No Depression, writer Geoffrey

Himes pointed to Seattle, Washington, as the hub for another group of musicians

engaged in blending country, folk and jazz.10 Himes provides telling interviews with,

and commentary on, the scene’s principal performers—keyboardist Wayne Horvitz,

pianist/singer Robin Holcomb, and guitarist Bill Frisell (who also appears as a guest

on Norah Jones’s disc). Himes’s article offers especially discerning insights on the

10 Geoffrey Himes, ‘‘A New Intersection at the Crossroads: Bill Frisell, Robin Holcomb, Wayne Horvitz,

and Danny Barnes Cultivate a Common Ground Between Country and Jazz in Seattle.’’ No Depression

43 (January/ February 2003). Archived at http://www.nodepression.net/archive/nd43/features/seattle-

jazz.html (accessed August 10, 2006).

Figure 1 Album cover photo to Sonny Rollins, Way Out West (1957). Image courtesy of

Fantasy Records.


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compositions and recordings these artists produce and the circumstances that

enabled the sounds. He suggests, for instance, that since neither Seattle’s jazz scene

nor its country music scene had ever attracted much attention beyond the regional

level, the musicians there were not tied down to set notions of ‘‘purity’’ or

‘‘tradition’’ in either genre and thus more free to experiment with both. Himes

devotes extensive space to Frisell, and focuses particular attention on the guitarist’s

1997 release Nashville, which he describes as ‘‘catalytic,’’ suggesting a larger trend was

under way.11

By the time he made Nashville, Frisell had already established a formidable

reputation for himself as a performer, composer, and bandleader on a number of

other genre-blurring projects during a dynamic stint in New York’s ‘‘downtown’’

music community in the 1980s. But this recording seemed different, even for

someone who appeared to revel in jazz-inflected musical diversity. The project was

recorded in Tennessee and featured respected Nashville-based players Viktor Krauss

(bass), Pat Bergeson (harmonica), Adam Steffey (mandolin), Ron Block (banjo and

acoustic guitar), and Jerry Douglas (dobro). So unlike Frisell’s 1993 release Have a

Little Faith, which presented songs from a dizzying range of North American

composers (Aaron Copland, Madonna, Bob Dylan, Stephen Foster, Muddy Waters,

and Charles Ives, among others) but delivered in a postmodern style typical of the

downtown scene, Nashville actually highlighted bluegrass- and country-oriented

musicians ‘‘at home,’’ literally and stylistically, and so seemed to uphold a quirky sort

of country authenticity while still being marketed as a jazz disc.12

Frisell hails originally from Denver and, recalling the Nashville session, told Himes

that,

When I grew up in Colorado, country was around the periphery all the time … butI tried to ignore it and even actively resisted it. When I was a teenager, the rock ‘n’roll that I liked—stuff by Dylan and the Byrds—had a lot of country in it, but assoon as I discovered jazz, I became a total jazz snob and shut the door oneverything else.

But when I did this Nashville project, I realized I had heard a lot of countrymusic over the years, and I realized I really liked it. And when I let myself like it, Ibecame fascinated with trying to find what it had in common with jazz. I startedlistening to a lot of older music from the early part of the century, the Harry SmithAnthology [of American Folk Music], the Library of Congress recordings, and the oldblues guys.13

12 Nashville peaked at #21 on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz chart in 1997. For more on Have a Little

Faith, see the chapter ‘‘Jazz Traditioning: Setting Standards at Century’s Close,’’ in my book Jazz

Cultures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).13 Quoted in Himes, ‘‘New Intersection.’’

11 Bill Frisell, Nashville, Elektra/Nonescuh 79415, 1997, compact disc. Besides Jones and Frisell, other

contemporary artists mixing jazz with folk, country, or bluegrass include Bela Fleck, the Hot Club of

Cowtown, and Sam Bush. Bush’s 2004 CD, King of the World (Sugar Hill 3987), includes a cut called

‘‘Mahavishnu Mountain Boys,’’ a title that playfully references guitarist John McLaughlin’s 1970s jazz-

rock fusion band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra.


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Frisell’s comments here are instructive, both in the way they highlight the prevalent

hierarchy upheld by some that would place jazz well above country and other popular

styles (‘‘I became a total jazz snob,’’ ‘‘when I let myself like it,’’ etc.), and in the

specific subgenres of country that Frisell wanted to explore (‘‘authentic’’ field

recordings and early commercial releases that are seen as the ‘‘roots’’ of the genre;

that is, the Carter Family matters, while current Music City heartthrob, Kenny

Chesney, is beyond serious consideration). Himes applauds the efforts of Frisell and

the other members of the Seattle contingent for bringing these worlds together in a

subgenre he calls ‘‘pastoral jazz.’’ However, he stops short of crediting the group with

instigating the trend; for that he cites Munich-based ECM Records.

In his 2001 article published in the Chicago Tribune (and covering much of the

same ground as the 2003 No Depression essay) Himes wrote that,

It was ECM that first inspired the notion of ‘‘pastoral jazz.’’ Just because jazz hadalways been an urban music—reflecting the jittery rhythms, metallic horns andsurging energy of American cities—didn’t mean that it always had to be. In ECM’ssignature sound—the patiently unfolding arrangements, the softly glowing tonesand the slurred legato phrasing—perceptive observers spied the possibility of arural jazz, a shared improvisation reflecting farms and forests rather than streetsand skyscrapers.14

Himes is correct. Some of the jazz musicians who recorded for ECM, including Frisell

himself, had evoked rural regions (American and otherwise) as far back as the early

1970s. But his assertion raises some important questions. Namely, why did these

artists feel a need to depict ‘‘farms and forests’’ in jazz? More to the point, what does

the emergence of this ‘‘pastoral’’ music tell us about the changing social and cultural

climate for jazz?

To begin to address these questions, it will help to recall ECM’s founding amidst

the broader cultural scenes of the 1970s. In the course of examination, we will explore

the key roles played by two musicians born in the United States—Keith Jarrett and

Pat Metheny—in shaping an idealized notion of non-urban America through varying

types of pastoral jazz.

ECM and the Dual Legacy of the 1960s

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosenpeople, whose breast he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuinevirtue.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Query XIX (1785).

As suggested in the above quotation, the roots of an idealized rural life run to the very

foundation of the United States. Jefferson’s thoughts were echoed in the nineteenth

14 Geoffrey Himes, ‘‘Hybrid Harmony: Bill Frisell Pitches His Tent at the Intersection of Country and

Jazz,’’ Chicago Tribune, April 20, 2001, p. 3. Republished online with the new title ‘‘Pastoral Jazz and the

Unspoken Code,’’ http://www.jazzhouse.org/library/index.php3?read5himes1 (accessed August 8,

2006).


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century when a back-to-the-land aesthetic—which venerated ‘‘nature’’ and a

‘‘simple’’ lifestyle—permeated the Transcendentalist philosophies of Henry David

Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Brook Farm founder George Ripley, as well as

the paintings of Thomas Cole and his fellow artists of the Hudson River School.15

That aesthetic impulse reasserted itself at the turn of the twentieth century with both

the founding of the national park system under Theodore Roosevelt and the popular

success of the anthology, Our National Parks, which collected John Muir’s wildlife

essays.16 Three decades later, this pastoral theme resonated with Depression-era

populist principles, as the art of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and Walker

Evans depicted in different ways a spacious nation stocked with hearty, if stoic,

inhabitants, just as Roy Harris, Ferde Grofe, and Aaron Copland were developing the

art-music equivalent of the bold North American landscape painting.17

Though the Americanized versions of the pastoral jazz that ECM fostered in the

1970s are closely related to these and other varied expressions of an open and free

rusticity, the jazz subgenre at issue can be heard most clearly and directly as an

extension of—and somewhat paradoxically, as also a reaction against—the

collectivist principles of 1960s counterculture. During that decade, a highly visible

contingent of American youth became dissatisfied with what they viewed as the

futility of trying to change ‘‘the Establishment’’ from within. In a move that is now

almost as mythologized as (and was undoubtedly influenced by) Thoreau’s escape to

Walden Pond a century earlier, this mostly white and middle class youth subculture

dropped out of the mainstream and extolled the virtues of communal agrarian living.

At the same time, rock musicians, many of whom had previously churned out

revved-up blues-based material, began to produce roots-oriented songs and albums

that incorporated country-, folk-, and bluegrass-related lyrics and instrumental

textures.18

17 For more on the nature-inspired music of these composers, see Brooks Tolliver, ‘‘Eco-ing in the

Canyon: Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite and the Transformation of Wilderness,’’ Journal of the

American Musicological Society 57 (Summer 2004): 325–67; Denise von Glahn, The Sounds of Place: Music

and the American Cultural Landscape (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003); and Levy, ‘‘The

White Hope.’’18 Compare, for instance, the Grateful Dead’s 1970 Workingman’s Dead (Warner Bros. WS-1869, LP) and

1971 American Beauty (Mobile Fidelity MFS-1-014, LP) with the group’s earlier, more rock-, blues-,

and psychedelic-tinged releases, the 1968 album Anthem of the Sun (Warner Bros. WS-1749, LP) and 1969

Aoxomoxoa (Warner Bros. WS-1790, LP). Meanwhile, after shocking the folk-revivalist movement by

‘‘going electric’’ at Newport in 1965, Dylan turned around and released a string of country-inflected

recordings, beginning with the 1968 album John Wesley Harding (Columbia C-2804, LP) and running

through the 1969 Nashville Skyline (Columbia HE-49825, LP) and 1970 New Morning (Columbia KC-

30290, LP). Similarly, at this time, Dylan’s sidemen began recording their own material as The Band

(from 1968 forward), with a number of Robbie Robertson compositions that drew heavily on rural

Americana.

15 Ripley, a former Transcendentalist minister, founded Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in

1841 as an agrarian utopia designed to wed intellectual life and manual labor. The project died six years

later in the wake of internal disagreements and a fire that destroyed much of the compound.16 John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901; reprint, San Francisco: Sierra Club

Books, 1991).


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As attractive as such musical evocations of rural life became for many rock-

oriented musicians and listeners during the mid-to-late 1960s, this trend had little

interaction with the prevalent jazz ethos of the time. Such images and sounds were

particularly anathema among the vast majority of post-bop and free-jazz musicians in

New York and other Northern areas who, with few exceptions, reveled in their

urbanity.19 As noted, the proponents of these latter genres largely rejected rural

music, particularly white rural music from the South. In jazz circles, idioms such as

folk, country, and bluegrass were considered musically backward, if not something

more socially nefarious. As Olivia Mather shows in her forthcoming study of country

rock, early 1960s media coverage of the battles between Civil Rights advocates and

segregationists in the South ‘‘tainted country music’s reputation for many years to

come, specifically through the connection of several country artists to George

Wallace’s campaigns, but also through a kind of guilt by association, where the music

of white, working class Southerners was equated with racist and reactionary

politics.’’20

Despite the prevailing urbanized sentiments of the dominant jazz culture, a few

young jazz musicians began to express a kinship with the ideals of the emerging folk/

rural/rock-based movement. Among this jazz minority was Keith Jarrett (born 1945),

a white pianist and composer, who, after spending a brief time with Art Blakey’s Jazz

Messengers, began making a name for himself in a group led by the African-

American saxophonist and flutist, Charles Lloyd. Lloyd’s group enjoyed surprising

success among the burgeoning ‘‘flower-power’’ ethos on the West Coast. Jarrett’s

biographer, Ian Carr, points out that, ‘‘Jarrett and [Lloyd’s drummer Jack]

DeJohnette were younger than [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney and had

grown up with ears attuned to the Beatles and rock music, and so were solidly of the

sixties generation.’’21 Around this same time, Jarrett began recording as a leader,

performing instrumental versions of Dylan’s ‘‘My Back Pages’’ (on Somewhere Before,

1968) and Joni Mitchell’s ‘‘All I Want to Do’’ (Mourning of a Star, 1971), as well as

his own folk-revival compositions (Restoration Ruin, 1968) on which he plays

acoustic guitar and earnestly sings of nature and love.22 These activities leave little

doubt about Jarrett’s sympathetic stance toward the counterculture. Jarrett

confirmed this sentiment himself in a 1987 interview when he recalled, ‘‘I shared a

lot of the questions that people [who] came to [rock-oriented venues like] the

Fillmore had. Outside of music, I mean, just the questions, the life-size, universe-size

20 Olivia Mather, ‘‘Cosmic American Music’’: Region, Nation, and Country Rock, 1965–1975 (Ph.D. diss.,

UCLA, forthcoming).21 Ian Carr, Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music (New York: Da Capo), 32.22 Keith Jarrett, Restoration Ruin, Vortex 2008, 1968, LP; reissued with Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bap-

tizum, Collectables, Col-CD-6274, 1999, compact disc; Somewhere Before, Atlantic SD-8808-2, 1968,

LP (reissued Atlantic WPCR 25007, 1990, compact disc); The Mourning of a Star, Atlantic SD-1596,

1971, LP (reissued Wounded Bird Records WOU 1596, 2001, compact disc).

19 The gospel-soaked sounds of saxophonist Albert Ayler could be heard as a notable exception to this

rule, and one could argue that elements of the hard bop subgenre, particularly Cannonball Adderley’s

work, reflected a distinctly African American return to earthy Southern roots. Still, jazz overwhelmingly

remained a sound of the city throughout the 1960s.


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questions.’’23 Jarrett’s youthful, rural-hippie leanings during the 1960s were echoed

in many of his ECM recordings a few years later.

As I suggested above, however, the rise of a pastoral sound in the 1970s can also be

seen as a turning away from the 1960s vision of a universal idealism. Whether caused

by the inability to end the conflict in Vietnam, the tragedy at the Rolling Stones

concert at Altamont Speedway in December 1969, or the transitions of most 1960s

youth into the inevitable responsibilities of adulthood, the opening of the 1970s saw

many of those same young Americans distancing themselves from their former wide-

eyed optimism.24 The drastic degree to which attitudes in rock music had shifted

away from the supposedly all-encompassing ‘‘Aquarian’’ spirit can be heard in Nick

Lowe and Elvis Costello’s questioning 1974 plea to their now-cynical contemporaries,

‘‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?’’25

While the popular designation of the 1970s as ‘‘The Me Generation’’ over-

simplified the realities of the time, there is little question that the post-Woodstock

period did witness a hunkering down of sorts, with a concomitant rise of smaller,

more closely knit, regional communities in popular music. For example, that decade

marked the birth of both punk and disco, two signature music styles from different

East Coast communities. More tellingly, in the 1970s, popular music listeners also

heard the heated anti-Southern politics of California-based singer/songwriter Neil

Young in his highly popular songs, ‘‘Southern Man’’ and ‘‘Alabama,’’ just as the

United States saw the brief-but-bright flowering of Southern rock, with its proud

anthems ‘‘Sweet Home Alabama’’ (Lynyrd Skynyrd), ‘‘The South’s Gonna Do it

Again,’’ and ‘‘Long-Haired Country Boy’’ (both from the Charlie Daniels Band).26

24 The Rolling Stones intended their free concert at Altamont on December 6, 1969, as a ‘‘gift’’ to the people

of San Francisco, and it was supposed to serve as a sort of West Coast version of Woodstock. Instead it became

infamous for the stabbing death of concert goer Meredith Hunter, an eighteen–year-old African American

man, by members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club. The Angels were hired as security for that event.25 To be sure, there never was a ‘‘Counterculture’’ in a monolithic sense during the 1960s. Participants

in the Free Speech Movement, Black Panthers, Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society, the

Youth International Party, and other groups each followed their own agendas and codes of conduct. Still,

there is no question that the members of all the various organizations, large and small, shared the belief

that something needed to change in the U.S., and that young people were the most qualified to carry out

that change. For more on both the factionalism that characterized the late 1960s and the dissolution of

many of those groups, see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam,

1987). ‘‘What’s So Funny’’ was composed and first recorded by Nick Lowe in 1974 with his British pub

rock band, Brinsley Schwartz, on Brinsley Schwartz, The New Favourites of Brinsley Schwartz, United

Artists 29641, 1974, LP. Elvis Costello’s more famous version, which Lowe produced, was released in the

U.S. on the LP Armed Forces. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Armed Forces, Columbia 35709, 1979, LP.

23 San Francisco’s Fillmore West (1965–1989) and New York’s Fillmore East (1968–1971), both

founded by entrepreneur Bill Graham, served as important venues for counter-culture music in the

1960s, hosting The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Grateful Dead, and many other acts, including the

Charles Lloyd Quartet with Keith Jarrett. The Jarrett interview originally aired on the National Public

Radio series ‘‘Sidran on Record.’’ It was eventually transcribed and published in Ben Sidran, Talking

Jazz: An Oral History, expanded edition (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 284.

26 Neil Young, ‘‘Southern Man,’’ After the Gold Rush, Reprise 2283, 1970 LP. Neil Young, ‘‘Alabama,’’

Harvest, Reprise 2032, 1972, LP. Lynyrd Skynyrd, ‘‘Sweet Home Alabama,’’ Second Helping, MCA 413,

1974, LP. Charlie Daniels Band, ‘‘The South’s Gonna Do It Again’’ and ‘‘Long-Haired Country Boy,’’

Fire on the Mountain, Kama Sutra 2603, 1975, LP.


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Similar rural/regional sounds were being worked out elsewhere. In the Midwest, the

band Kansas combined progressive rock with American-folk elements, while in

California, Gram Parsons, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and others, fashioned what

became known as country rock. Great Britain nurtured its own version of this trend

through the sounds of Pentangle, early Genesis, and (at times) even Led Zeppelin.27

This is not to say that Keith Jarrett or similarly guided jazz performers and composers

were directly taking their cues from any of the above-named rock groups. Rather, in

post-1960s United States (and Britain and Europe), a rural ideal re-emerged in

popular culture (recall that 1970 saw the first Earth Day celebration, with the

formation of Greenpeace following a year later), and musicians from a number of

regions and genres drew on and helped to configure these understandings in different

ways.

Within this burgeoning ‘‘green’’ awareness, erstwhile bassist Manfred Eicher

founded ECM Records in 1969.28 ECM’s earliest releases from pianists Mal Waldron

and Paul Bley established the label as home to a ‘‘serious’’ if introspective brand of

jazz. The label soon achieved worldwide acclaim for its unique ‘‘audiophile’’ sonic

qualities and austere album cover designs. By 1971, Canada’s Coda magazine had

hailed the music as ‘‘the most beautiful sound next to silence,’’ a line the company

still wears with some pride.29 Since its inception, ECM has been home to a diverse

range of jazz and, more recently, ‘‘new music’’ performers and composers from

throughout the Americas and Europe, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Arvo

Part, Eberhard Weber, Egberto Gismonti, Carla Bley, Jan Garbarek, Jack DeJohnette,

Arild Andersen, Steve Reich, and, for a time, Bill Frisell. Many of these musicians

explored pastoral styles that reflected their own native lands; virtually all of them

received (detractors might say ‘‘endured’’) Eicher’s distinctively ‘‘spacious’’ sound,

achieved through a liberal dose of studio-induced reverb. Without question,

however, ECM’s biggest names during the 1970s and into the 1980s were Keith Jarrett

and guitarist Pat Metheny (born 1954). Of the two, Jarrett remains the musician most

closely associated with the label. He first recorded for ECM in 1971 and continues to

work with that label to this day. In all, he has released roughly sixty recordings

through the company, featuring both improvised music and fully notated scores,

original compositions and ‘‘covers,’’ all in a broad range of ensemble sizes and

instrumentations.

Romanticism and the American ‘‘Folk’’

Keith Jarrett’s reputation was most firmly established by his series of solo piano

recordings, particularly his Koln Concert (1975), which is reported to have sold over

28 ECM stands for Edition of Contemporary Music.29 See the ‘‘About ECM’’ section from the label’s website, at: http://www.ecmrecords.com/About_ECM/

History/index.php?rubchooser5103&mainrubchooser51 (accessed August 10, 2006)

27 For more on the rise of country rock, see, again, Mather, ‘‘Cosmic American Music.’’ For more on

Kansas and other folk-infused ‘‘prog’’ rock, see Mitchell Morris, ‘‘Kansas and the Prophetic Tone,’’

American Music 18 (Spring 2000): 1–38.


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three million copies, a staggering sum for a jazz piano recording.30 Such an

achievement appears even more astonishing given that the record does not really

feature any ‘‘songs’’ per se, but rather four extended improvised episodes, simply

labeled ‘‘Part I,’’ Part IIa,’’ ‘‘Part IIb,’’ and ‘‘Part IIc.’’ With the vast sweep of musical

territory that Jarrett explores on Koln and his other solo concerts, it would be

inappropriate to pigeonhole him into any particular musical subgenre. Still, it is not

unfair to suggest that his concerts tend to visit fairly discreet musical ‘‘regions,’’

including prominent excursions through the pastoral territory that this paper

addresses. Listen, for instance, to the country/gospel-ish feel beginning around 21:15

of Part I, or, for that matter, throughout virtually all of Part IIa.

To be sure, it is easy to hear much of Jarrett’s solo work as more closely allied with

nineteenth-century European Romanticism than with twentieth-century American

country or folk musics. But if any questions remain that at least portions of Jarrett’s

solo concerts evoke or emanate from an Americanized rural ideal, Jarrett himself

seems to dispel these in two concert recordings he released in the 1980s. Rather than

labeling each section numerically, as he had done on the Koln Concert, he designated

one portion of his 1981 concert in Bregenz Austria as ‘‘Heartland.’’ Here he blends

plagal cadences and other harmonic devices seemingly pulled from the Protestant

hymnal with Billy Joel-like singer-songwriter inflections. Similarly, his 1987 Tokyo

concert, released as Dark Intervals, features a segment called ‘‘Americana.’’ This time,

Jarrett’s improvisation draws on ‘‘noble’’ film-score rhetoric of the Hollywood

western, a hint of country rock gestures, and, again, ample plagal cadences. While

distinctions mark each track, both of them seem to stand in apparent homage to

Middle America as the embodiment of humble, quiet dignity.

Beyond these programmatically titled nods to the rural United States, the overall

notion of ‘‘developmental’’ improvisation, such as Jarrett follows throughout all of

his solo concerts, seems more conducive to evocations of open landscapes than does a

typical bebop-informed jazz performance (an effect that is enhanced, no doubt, by

ECM’s aforementioned reverb-soaked sound).

Bebop-type improvisations rarely grow as ‘‘organically’’ as Jarrett’s solo work does,

though jazz critics and analysts have often appropriated this formal term from

classical music (as in Gunther Schuller’s 1958 essay on Sonny Rollins’s ‘‘Blue 7’’

solo).31 Rather, bop-based musicians generate interest by creative manipulation of

small-scale elements over a repeating 12- or 32-bar song form and a steady pulse. The

regularity of the groove and harmonic cycles generally leads to recurring fluctuations

of tension and release. Recent scholars disagree on the extent to which mid-century

bebop musicians viewed their own music as an overt political statement, Afrocentric

31 Gunther Schuller, ‘‘Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation,’’ in Musings: The

Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 86–97. Reprinted from

The Jazz Review, November 1958.

30 Keith Jarrett, The Koln Concert, ECM 810067, 1975, LP. Sales figured quoted from Ian Carr, Digby

Fairweather, Brian Priestly, Jazz: The Rough Guide (London and New York: Rough Guides, Ltd, 1995),

326. For more on Jarrett’s solo work, see the chapter ‘‘Body and Soul: Performing Deep Jazz,’’ in Ake,

Jazz Cultures.


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or otherwise. Yet it is hard to argue that bop’s severely angular melodic lines and

often blazing tempos over a regular form represented anything less than a fierce

statement of hip, urbane, assertiveness in the 1940s and 1950s. Black scholar L. D.

Reddick said as much as early as 1949: ‘‘Bop is essentially modern and urban.… It is

the music of sophisticated and modernized individuals and groups.’’32 For Reddick,

bebop served as a sound of the city at the time, and in many circles these urbanized

understandings continue to this day.33

All of this is a far cry from the gradual unfolding typically found in Jarrett’s solo

piano work. The fact that Jarrett does not adhere to song forms allows him to alter,

extend, or otherwise develop his ideas without having to adjust to the harmonic,

melodic, and rhythmic constraints of pre-composed material. For some listeners, the

approach feels liberating, empowering, even mystical. For others, the lack of regular

cycles can seem self indulgent and tedious. Regardless of the experience, there is no

question that Jarrett’s open-ended concerts metaphorically explore ‘‘wide open

spaces’’—rhythmically, formally, and harmonically—more fully than do traditional

song form-based jazz performances.34

Outside these solo performances, Jarrett’s evocations of a rural ideal can also be

heard on portions of his group recordings from the 1970s, most clearly on two highly

acclaimed discs he recorded for ECM: Belonging (1974) and My Song (1977).35

Accompanying Jarrett on both are saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielson,

and drummer Jon Christensen. On Belonging, for example, listen to the loping,

country-style figures that shape ‘‘Long as You Know You’re Living Yours.’’ Or

consider ‘‘The Windup,’’ which, in the words of Ian Carr, ‘‘is inspired by the kind of

boisterous ‘hoedown’ found in some American square dancing.’’36 It is no

33 For more on the political debates surrounding early bebop, see Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Blues

People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963; reprint, New York: Quill,

1983); Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1997); Eric Lott, ‘‘Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style,’’ in Jazz Among

the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Ingrid Monson, ‘‘The

Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,’’

Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (Fall 1995): 396–422; and Porter, What Is This Thing.34 ‘‘Part IIc’’ of the Koln Concert is an exception. Although the official transcription of that recording

maintains the ‘‘Part IIc’’ designation, this segment clearly follows a regular song form, and, in fact, a lead

sheet of it appears in The Real Book compilation as ‘‘Memories of Tomorrow.’’ See Keith Jarrett, The

Koln Concert: Original Transcription (New York: Schott, 1991), 82, and The Real Book, vol. 1, 6th ed. for

all C instruments (New York: Hal Leonard, 2004), 267.35 Keith Jarrett with Jan Garbarek, Belonging, ECM 829115, 1974, LP. Keith Jarrett Quartet, My Song,

ECM 821406, 1977, LP. Belonging won the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis and Jazz Forum’s Record of

the Year. Ian Carr heralded both discs as ‘‘masterpieces’’ in Jazz: The Rough Guide (New York: Penguin,

1995), 325. (Page 385 in the 2nd edition [2005].)36 Carr, Keith Jarrett, 78. Walter Becker and Donald Fagan of the rock group Steely Dan admitted in an

interview that they used Jarrett’s ‘‘Long as You Know You’re Living Yours’’ as the basis for their song

‘‘Gaucho.’’ Jarrett eventually sued the group for copyright infringement and is now listed as co-composer

on ‘‘Gaucho.’’

32 Quoted in Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz: African-American Musicians as Artists, Critics,

and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 90. Originally published as L. D. Reddick,

‘‘Dizzy Gillespie in Atlanta,’’ Phylon 10 (first quarter, 1949), 45–48.


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coincidence that the title of this last tune refers to the motion of a pitcher in

‘‘America’s pastime,’’ baseball.

Another representative of the idyllic in Jarrett’s quartet work is his composition

‘‘Country’’ from the My Song album. Here the mere title of the piece guides

understandings toward a pastoral motif, while the harmonic palette and melodic line,

as well as the performers’ approach to the song, leave no doubt that we are dealing

with a distinctly North American rural setting. ‘‘Country’’ is comprised of four 16-

bar sections, arranged AABB, in the key of E-flat. After a 16-bar solo-piano

introduction, the full quartet enters for the statement of the theme. The song’s

harmonic scheme is simple, never straying far from basic I, IV, V, and vi chords,

moving briefly only to the key of A-flat in the B section before quickly working back

to the tonic. The melody is equally straightforward, every note staying within the E-

flat-major scale. Jarrett relies predominantly on triadic harmony throughout the

performance, his chord voicings largely eschewing the tension-heightening ‘‘altera-

tions’’ that typify bop-based piano playing. Rhythmically, the group adheres to a

straight-eighth-note feel, with Danielsson and Christensen providing a steady,

unadorned, foundation. The drummer’s only concession to a looser, ‘‘jazz’’-like,

groove are his occasional punctuations on the ‘‘and’’ of beat three, whereas a typical

country or pop approach calls for regular snare drum accents on beats two and four.

The musicians retain the original character of the piece for the entire performance.

Aside from the piano introduction, the only solos here are a subdued 32-bar foray by

bassist Danielsson followed by a slightly more assertive, though still melody-driven,

16 bars from Jarrett. This approach serves to support the pastoral feeling pervading

the recording and represents a marked departure from many post-bop performances

since the 1960s in which players engage in long and often highly elaborate improvised

excursions over stark forms. In the final analysis, ‘‘Country’’ is an unabashedly

‘‘pretty’’ song, and that track helped the My Song album achieve an unusual degree of

popular success. The album even cracked the Billboard pop charts in 1978, and it

remains one of the pianist’s best-known discs.37 Nailing down the music’s allure is

tricky, but it may be that it resonated with the new kind of environmentalism among

many listeners of the time: a post Earth Day, post photos-of-the-Earth-from-space

awareness of the fragility of the planet. Jarrett’s vision here of the American landscape

is not so much one of hearty farm folk toiling in the fields or of awe-inspiring vistas,

but rather a tender homage to a quiet ‘‘home.’’

There is a certain irony in the fact that Keith Jarrett is the only participant on this

seemingly all-American album of pastoral jazz to have been born or even reside in the

37 ‘‘Country’’ resurfaced in 2001, along with other Jarrett recordings, as a theme song of sorts in the

German film Bella Martha (English title: ‘‘Mostly Martha’’; Bavaria et al., 2001). One American film

reviewer singled out its use in the soundtrack, describing ‘‘Country’’ as ‘‘Keith Jarrett’s c&w-inflected

ballad … (a sprightly, lilting, slightly melancholy piece for a jazz quartet.)’’ Given the critic’s mention of

‘‘C&W’’—country and western—it is quite clear, and more than a little remarkable, that the song retains

a rural-American flavor, even in a German-language film about a widowed chef set in Hamburg. See

Michael Wilmington, ‘‘Review of Mostly Martha,’’ at http://www.zap2it.com/movies/movies/reviews/text/

0,1259,-13454,00.html (accessed August 10, 2006).


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United States. Besides the pianist, the recording was the work of two Norwegians

(Garbarek and Christensen) and a Swede (Danielssen). The session was recorded in

Oslo by a pair of Germans—sound engineer Jan-Erik Kongshaug and producer

Manfred Eicher. Such a revelation marks an appropriate place to confess that I

originally planned to call this paper ‘‘The Emergence of the Rural Ideal in American

Jazz.’’ I substituted the present title when I realized that it is one thing to say that the

music discussed here in some ways points to or derives from a rural ‘‘American-

ness.’’ But it is quite another to designate this group as ‘‘American jazz.’’ This

observation is extremely relevant, given the location where the music was recorded,

the label that released the album, and the range of nationalities of the participants. Be

that as it may, Jarrett’s ECM recordings in the 1970s should be seen as a significant

influence on the subsequent development of the rural American ideal in jazz, as well

as, in a curious twist, on a range of regional subgenres from throughout the globe. In

showing musicians that one could play something called jazz in the 1970s without

having to sound like (or be) a New York-based hard-bop or free-jazz stylist, Jarrett’s

popular and commercial successes on ECM made it more acceptable for players and

composers everywhere to explore their own local sounds, grooves, and aesthetics. In

this way, Jarrett and his label helped to accelerate and legitimate the emergence of

what has been called variously European jazz, Euro jazz, World jazz, even

‘‘glocalized’’ jazz, a phenomena that go somewhat beyond the scope of this paper.38

Jarrett never seems to vie for authentic renditions of gospel, folk, or country in his

performances. His playing is often too dense harmonically, and his virtuosic and

clear-toned style does not suit the rough-and-ready elements of these more

vernacular idioms. Still, his borrowings from and ‘‘signifyin’’’ on these other music

cultures is unmistakable. Moreover, we should recognize that the rural imagery that

emerges from Jarrett’s ECM recordings is grounded firmly in European-American

notions of ‘‘the great outdoors.’’ Jarrett did suggest Native American lore on his

‘‘Yaqui Indian Song’’ (The Impulse Years, 1997), ‘‘Great Bird’’ (Death and the Flower,

1974), ‘‘Sundance’’ (Expectations, 1971), and ‘‘De Drums’’ (Fort Yawuh, 1973). But

he recorded these compositions with different sidemen on different labels (Columbia

or Impulse!), and they never achieved the commercial success of the ECM discs, nor

have they seemed to inspire many other performers or composers to develop their

38 For a discussion of ‘‘glocalization,’’ see Stuart Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead (Or Has It Moved to a New

Address)? (New York: Routledge, 2005). Elsewhere in that book, Nicholson interviews British

saxophonist Iain Ballamy, who said: ‘‘My first few years as a player were spent learning and absorbing

the music of the American jazz masters, but the biggest personal revelation for me was the discovery of

the music typified by the ECM label, especially albums like My Song with Jan Garbarek and Keith Jarrett

… This music—non-blues based, lyrical, and occasionally folky—seemed to resonate more strongly with

me, being a European. It came to me at the time I was beginning to write my own material and very

quickly discovered that playing one’s own tunes in a way that felt right as an ‘Englishman,’ rather than in

an appropriated genre from another place and time, felt natural and right for me.’’ (174; Nicholson does

not cite the original source of the quote.) See also the mention of Keith Jarrett by Swedish pianist

Esbjorn Svensson in Christopher Porter, ‘‘Taking Five with … E.S.T.,’’ JazzTimes 36 (February 2006),

36. For more on ‘‘European jazz,’’ see David Ake ‘‘Negotiating Style, Nation, and Identity among

American Jazz Musicians in Paris,’’ Journal for Musicological Research 23 (April–June, 2004): 159–86.


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own Native-Americanist, rural-oriented approaches.39 Among the legion who picked

up on Jarrett’s Euro-American rural aesthetic was Pat Metheny, perhaps the single-

most important musician in shaping Americanized pastoral jazz, and so the focus of

the remainder of this paper.

New American Guitar Hero

It is no coincidence that Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell, two of the more prominent

presences in this essay, are guitarists. The guitar is the only instrument that regularly

serves a ‘‘front-line’’ role in folk, blues, country, rock, and jazz, so guitarists are more

readily able to move among and incorporate elements of each of these genres.40

Though three years younger than Frisell, Metheny received the earliest widespread

attention of the two, and he has sustained a remarkable level of commercial and

critical success since his 1974 debut on ECM as a twenty-year old sideman for

vibraphonist Gary Burton.41 Burton himself had explored American pastoral-jazz

idioms in the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably on his albums Tennessee Firebird

(1966) (which featured both Chet Atkins and Roy Haynes!) and Country Roads

(1969), as well as his recorded collaboration with Keith Jarrett (1971).42

Undoubtedly, Metheny’s entrance into Burton’s group was based in part on these

musicians’ shared interest in a pastoral-jazz aesthetic.

Pat Metheny was raised in the Kansas City suburb of Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

Interviews reveal that he was a devoted Beatles fan until he experienced a jazz

epiphany at twelve years old when he heard his older brother’s copy of Miles Davis’s

Four and More album. From that point, the guitarist jumped headlong into his

adopted genre, listening, practicing, and gigging extensively. After high school, he

headed to the University of Miami where he studied for one semester before being

asked to teach. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Boston, becoming the youngest

instructor ever at the Berklee College of Music. It was during this period that he

joined Burton’s group. While he readily absorbed the sounds of his new East Coast

surroundings, he never left his Midwest roots entirely behind. In fact, the opposite is

true. For, as DownBeat contributor Neil Tesser noted as early as 1979, ‘‘Metheny’s

music springs directly from the American heartland in which he grew up.’’43

40 Bass and drums can also play an important function in all of these genres, of course, but they typically

appear in more supporting roles.41 Metheny first recorded as a sideman for the label on Ring led by Gary Burton and Eberhard Weber.

The Gary Burton Quintet with Eberhard Weber, Ring, ECM 1051, 1974, LP.42 Gary Burton, Tennessee Firebird RCA LSP3719, 1966, LP; Gary Burton, Country Roads RCA SF8042,

1969, LP; Gary Burton and Keith Jarrett, Atlantic SD1677, 1971, LP.43 Neil Tesser, ‘‘Pat Metheny: Fresh Face of Fusion,’’ DownBeat, March 22, 1979, 12.

39 Keith Jarrett, The Impulse Years, 1973–1974, Impulse! 237, 1997, compact disc. Keith Jarrett Quintet,

Death and the Flower, Impulse ASD 9301, 1974, LP. Keith Jarrett, Expectations, Columbia KG 31580,

1971, LP. Keith Jarrett, Fort Yawuh, Impulse! AS 9240, 1973, LP. Fort Yawuh peaked at 36 on the

Billboard Jazz chart. Ironically, one ECM musician who did record a Native American-inspired tune was

Jarrett’s Norwegian sideman, Jan Garbarek, with ‘‘Witchi-Tai-To,’’ composed by the saxophonist Jim

Pepper, a member of the Kaw Indian nation. Jan Garbarek with Bobo Stenson, Witchi-Tai-To, ECM

833330, 1974, LP.


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Metheny recorded ten albums for ECM as a leader between 1976 and 1985 before

moving on to an affiliation with Geffen Records. Like Keith Jarrett’s work for ECM,

the guitarist’s output on that label showcases a variety of instrumental combinations.

Despite the broad diversity of performing forces, however, at least eight of these

records include overt references (via song titles and photos) to rural settings, nature,

Americana in general, or parts of the Midwest in particular. (See Table 1.) His

compositional style and performances of those works cemented his central role as a

pastoral jazz proponent at that time. Metheny remarks even to this day of Jarrett’s

enormous influence on his music.44 Still, the guitarist found his own path, and his

Americanized pastoral jazz manifests itself in a number of different ways, shaped in

large measure by the performance setting in which he places himself. These variations

do not merely reflect different musical approaches to the same idea, but configure

differing notions of the United States beyond its cities’ limits.

‘‘Daybreak’’

In 1979, ECM released New Chautauqua, a one-man album featuring Metheny on a

variety of guitars. The record’s title references the Chautauqua Movement that, from

the 1870s to the 1920s, sought to provide Americans in the hinterland with religious,

artistic, intellectual, scientific, and political food for thought.45 In keeping with the

rural setting of the original movement, the cover photo of the New Chautauqua

record depicts an empty stretch of highway flanked on one side by a grove of trees, on

the other by a swath of green field. Superimposed above the scene in a photographic

negative is a small shot of Metheny holding a guitar in what appears to be a

performance venue or recording studio. The verdant foliage and the open

thoroughfare lend an air of the idyllic we have discussed, yet the ghostly image of

the musician floating over the highway could lead viewers to interpret this, not as a

‘‘pastoral’’ setting, but rather as a ‘‘road’’ record, a product of the guitarist’s

peripatetic lifestyle. Metheny played roughly 300 dates a year during this time, the

long string of gigs broken up only by even longer stretches in the tour bus. All of this

44 Metheny’s website features the guitarist’s answers to fans’ questions. His responses include such

statements as ‘‘I feel that Keith [Jarrett] is one of the greatest composers of our time, and I wish his music

was played more—it offers something really special that you just can’t find anywhere else, and there are

not a lot of contemporary jazz composers you can say that about.’’ Metheny also remarks that ‘‘Keith is

one of my all time favorite musicians—he is certainly one of the most important living musicians. There

is so much to say about Keith’s greatness, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I can’t really think of

anyone whose talent compares to his.’’ Select the keyword ‘‘Jarrett’’ at http://www.patmethenygroup.

com/pmg/qa/questionselect.cfm (accessed August 10, 2006).45 Pat Metheny, New Chatauqua, ECM 1131, 1979, LP. Considered one of the earliest instances of

‘‘adult education’’ in the United States, the Movement’s name comes from the location of the group’s

headquarters at Lake Chautauqua, New York. The center there served as the home to an annual eight-

week series of courses and lectures. The series eventually became mobile, as tent-show chautauquas

brought speakers to communities throughout the nation. Participants included Mark Twain, William

Jennings Bryan, and a number of American presidents.


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was memorialized in 1983 by a live double-album from the Pat Metheny Group

called, appropriately, Travels.46

The back-cover photo of the New Chautauqua album immediately settles any

ambiguity regarding the record’s open-spaces look. Here we see a much clearer image

of Metheny. Instead of capturing him at work (as on the front), this photo presents

him posed casually on a wooden stool. Bathed in sunlight streaming through a

window, Metheny’s tousled mane of hair haloes his smiling face. Again, he holds a

guitar, but unlike the indistinct front-cover image, we can readily recognize this as a

steel-stringed acoustic guitar. Such an instrument has long remained the preferred

choice for performers of country, folk, and other rural-American music idioms, but

has held virtually no place at all in modern jazz. To complete the scene, Metheny is

46 Pat Metheny Group, Travels, ECM 23791, 1983, LP.

Table 1 Sample of Pat Metheny composition titles from his ECM recordings.

ECM Album Title (Year) Song Title(s) Personnel (Instrument)

Bright Size Life (1976) ‘‘Missouri Uncompromised’’ Metheny (electric guitar)‘‘Midwestern Night’s Dream’’ Jaco Pastorius (electric bass)‘‘Omaha Celebration’’ Bob Moses (drums)

Watercolors (1977) ‘‘Lakes’’ Metheny (electric guitar)Lyle Mays (piano)Eberhard Weber (bass)Danny Gottlieb (drums)

Pat Metheny Group (1978) ‘‘April Wind’’ Metheny (electric guitar)Mays (piano, synthesizer, autoharp)Mark Egan (electric bass)Gottlieb (drums)

New Chautauqua (1979) ‘‘Country Poem’’ Metheny (electric and acoustic guitars,electric bass)

‘‘Daybreak’’American Garage (1980) ‘‘(Cross the) Heartland’’ Metheny (electric guitar)

‘‘Airstream Mays (piano, synthesizer, autoharp,organ)

Egan (electric bass)Gottlieb (drums)

80/81 (1980) ‘‘Two Folk Songs’’ Metheny (electric and acoustic guitar)Michael Brecker (tenor sax)Dewey Redman (tenor sax)Charlie Haden (bass)Jack DeJohnette (drums)

As Falls Wichita, So FallsWichita Falls (1981)

‘‘As Falls Wichita, So FallsWichita Falls’’

Metheny (electric guitar, electric bass)

‘‘Ozark’’ Mays (keys)Nana Vasconcelos (percussion)

Travels (1983) ‘‘The Fields, The Sky’’ Metheny (electric guitar)‘‘Farmer’s Trust’’ Mays (keys)

Vasconcelos (percussion)Gottlieb (drums)Steve Rodby (electric and acoustic

bass)


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barefooted and dressed in attire typical of Middle American youth of the time: a

cotton T-shirt with stenciled logo (obstructed by the guitar) and faded blue jeans—

Levi’s or possibly Wranglers (certainly not Sergio Valenti, Calvin Klein, or any of the

other ‘‘designer’’ versions of jeans favored by fans of disco music and other urban

genres in the 1970s) (see Figures 2 and 3). The overall impression here is youthful and

genial, and also unmistakably white. This presentation is a striking contrast to the

images of serious African American men that the jazz world had witnessed on record

covers and fan magazines since the middle 1940s (or would see again a decade later

with Wynton Marsalis and his Armani-clad cohort). The guitarist’s laid-back

demeanor even differs from the sub-Saharan dashikis or Arabic galabayas that some

players, black and white (including Keith Jarrett), adopted in the middle 1960s and

into the 1970s as a sign of solidarity with the increasingly visible Civil Rights

movement and ‘‘anti-Establishment’’ values.47

New Chautauqua’s down-home visual imagery finds a clear aural equivalent in the

record’s compositions and performances. The title cut commences with alternating

Figure 2 Front album cover photo to Pat Metheny, New Chautauqua (1979). Image

courtesy of ECM Records.

47 Carr, Keith Jarrett, 32.


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triads of B and A over a tonic E pedal vigorously strummed with a flat pick on the

acoustic guitar. Metheny’s choice of E as the tonic key maximizes his use of open

strings, and this, combined with the strumming technique, reinforces the connections

to country and folk styles. The song retains this flavor even after Metheny enters with

the song’s theme, which he has overdubbed using an electric hollow-body guitar,

modified by electronic effects. This added timbre would not be out of place in a jazz-

rock fusion setting of the time (it was his preferred sound with the Pat Metheny

Group), yet the acoustic guitar underpinnings, the strummed straight-eighth-note

rhythm, and triadic harmony virtually guarantee that we will hear ‘‘New

Chautauqua’’ as a type of rural-based music.

The extended explorations of ‘‘Long-Ago Child/Fallen Star’’ carry the album

briefly toward modernist timbral and rhythmic directions, but the pastoral feeling

pervades the entire rest of the disc. Listen, for example, to ‘‘Country Poem,’’ the

jangle-y finger picking of which would have sounded more idiomatically at home as a

sonic backdrop to Ken Burns’s The Civil War documentary (Florentine Films et al.,

Figure 3 Back album cover photo to Pat Metheny, New Chautauqua (1979)). Image

courtesy of ECM Records.


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1990) a decade later than to that filmmaker’s Jazz series of 2000 (Florentine Films

et al., 2001). Even at the time of the album’s release, jazz critic Larry Birnbaum

recognized (and seemed uncomfortable with) the racial implications of the music’s

rural qualities, writing that ‘‘with [this recording’s] churchy bluegrass and neo-

Romantic sensibilities, Metheny has fashioned a cleanly orchestrated rhapsody in

white, bearing none but the most tangential relationship to Afro-American

traditions.’’48

New Chautauqua draws so much on country and bluegrass practices that it is

difficult to see and hear how this record comes to be defined as ‘‘jazz’’ at all. Perhaps

it is because Metheny, young as he was, had already established himself in that genre

with his work alongside Gary Burton. Or maybe it is that ECM was known at that

time as a ‘‘jazz label,’’ so anything distributed under that brand would be placed

automatically in the jazz bins of record stores. (New Chautauqua was released before

the advent of ECM’s New Series recordings of ‘‘contemporary music’’ by John

Adams, Arvo Part, and others.) Or perhaps, as teachers of undergraduate jazz history

courses for non-music majors will attest, this recording was considered ‘‘jazz’’

because so many people consider ‘‘jazz’’ to be any instrumental music that is not

‘‘classical.’’49 Whatever the cause or causes, Pat Metheny presented a strikingly

different look and sound for the genre. Even more than Keith Jarrett’s work,

Metheny’s New Chautauqua album signaled a profound shift in how the music could

be practiced and understood from that point forward. For suddenly, the popularly

held meanings associated with blue jeans and the strummed steel-string acoustic

guitar—namely, white Middle America—were no longer antithetical to jazz; for those

many musicians and listeners invested in Pat Metheny’s presentation, they

represented, if not the only style of jazz, at least a viable and engaging subgenre of it.

While New Chautauqua serves as an unambiguous example of an American idyllic

strain in jazz during the 1970s, in one way it is somewhat of an anomaly in Metheny’s

oeuvre. For unlike Jarrett, who has devoted much of his career to solo concerts and

recordings, Pat Metheny has spent most of his time working alongside a host of other

musicians. Of these, it is worth discussing two individuals in particular: keyboardist

Lyle Mays and bassist Charlie Haden (a former Keith Jarrett sideman). Both of these

musicians played central roles in helping Metheny configure differing inflections of

the pastoral jazz theme.50

49 Much the same question about genre could be posed regarding Frisell’s Nashville release. Scholars

Scott DeVeaux and Krin Gabbard have produced important work on this topic. Still, the area remains

open for further research. See Scott DeVeaux, ‘‘Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,’’

Black American Literature Forum 25 (Fall 1991): 525–60, and Krin Gabbard, ‘‘Introduction: The Jazz

Canon and Its Consequences,’’ in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1995). Also relevant are my essays ‘‘Jazz Historiography and the Problem of Louis

Jordan’’ and the previously cited ‘‘Jazz Traditioning,’’ both in Ake, Jazz Cultures.50 Metheny did return to the solo-acoustic format with One Quiet Night, released by Warner Brothers in

2003 (Warner Bros. 48473, compact disc). On this set, Metheny covers Norah Jones’s ‘‘Don’t Know

Why’’ and Jarrett’s ‘‘My Song.’’

48 Larry Birnbaum, ‘‘Record Reviews: Pat Metheny, New Chautauqua,’’ DownBeat, September 6, 1979,

36.


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Charlie Haden was born in Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1937, but spent the majority of

his formative years in Springfield, Missouri. As a child, he soaked up the sounds of

hillbilly and white gospel music while singing and playing ukulele as part of The

Haden Family Singers radio show. Haden recounted those early years in a 1984

interview with writer Rafi Zabor:

I saw a special view of country America that you don’t get in the city. I used to goto houses in rural Missouri and people would be on their porches singing andplaying fiddles and blowing into moonshine jugs, playing washboards and spoons.My grandpa used to play the fiddle under his chest instead of his chin and he usedto tell me stories about Frank and Jesse James, the Younger Brothers and theDaltons. My grandma told me about Wild Bill Hickok in Springfield, Missouri.51

Like Metheny, Haden became aware of jazz as a teen through an older brother. After

taking up bass (another of his brother’s influences), he moved to Los Angeles in 1956,

and soon met and began working with Ornette Coleman. To many musicians, critics,

and listeners of the time, Coleman seemed like an iconoclast whose music was either

deliberately intended to shock or was a disturbing product of an anxious Cold War

era.52 Yet Haden heard the saxophonist differently. In Coleman, Haden found a

kindred spirit, one who, like himself, combined a thorough understanding of bebop’s

modernist principles with a deep knowledge of—and love for—rural American music

traditions. The clearest illustration of their shared aesthetic can be heard on

‘‘Ramblin,’’’ from Coleman’s Change of the Century album recorded in 1959.53 On

this cut, Haden’s bass solo consists almost entirely of playing the melody of the

traditional song ‘‘Old Joe Clark.’’

Haden reexamined that same melody two decades later as the second tune of a

quasi-medley called ‘‘Two Folk Songs,’’ which was positioned as the opening track of

Metheny’s 80/81 (recorded in Oslo, May 1980).54 The ‘‘Old Joe Clark’’ segment of

this track will be discussed in more detail below, but it bears noting here that the first

of the ‘‘folk’’ tunes on this pairing was not a long-established staple of musical

Americana, a la ‘‘Joe Clark,’’ but rather an original composition by Metheny. That is,

similar to Bob Dylan’s work during the folk-revivalist days in the early 1960s,

Metheny composed his own take on ‘‘timeless classics.’’ And like so many other

recompositions of folk music tune models and idioms, Metheny’s composition forges

an idealized vision of rural life as unadorned and unpretentious. For his ‘‘Folk Song

#1’’ (as it was titled later in its published form), he uses a sparse harmonic

progression of D, C, G, and A triads.55 His melody, based on short, hummable, three-

and four-note motives, outlines a D mixolydian mode. The song follows an irregular

51 Rafi Zabor, ‘‘Charlie Haden, Liberation and Revelation: The Probing Essence of the Bass,’’ Musician

66 (April 1984), 44.52 For more responses to Coleman, see John Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life (New York:

Morrow, 1992), and Peter Niklas Wilson, Ornette Coleman: His Life and Music (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills

Books, 1999).53 Ornette Coleman, Change of the Century, Atlantic SD-1327, 1960, LP.54 Pat Metheny, 80/81, ECM 815579, 1980, LP.55 Pat Metheny Songbook (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, n. d. but ca. 2000).


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variation of a standard AABA form: the standard 8-bar B section is framed by 11-bar

A sections, each of which features one bar in 5/4 meter, with the others in the more

typical 4/4. Presumably, Metheny chose these slight irregularities to approximate the

looseness of Depression-era Southern vernacular styles. Of course, ‘‘Folk Song #1’’

differs markedly from the unpolished work of, say, Jimmie Rodgers’ blue yodels, or

Robert Johnson’s Delta blues. In specific, Metheny composed the uneven phrase

length and maintains it in every A section, while Rodgers, Johnson, and similar

musicians tailored their phrasing to the circumstances of each iteration. As published

in the Metheny Songbook, the resulting composition looks like what it is: a clever

representation of musical Americana.

As with all orally/aurally-based genres, however, that which appears rather dull on

the printed page can come to life in performance. At nearly twenty-one minutes long,

‘‘Two Folk Songs’’ stands as one of the more fascinating jazz recordings of the 1980s.

Alongside Metheny and Haden on this track are saxophonist Michael Brecker and

drummer Jack DeJohnette. The musicians play the complete form of the composition

only twice—before and after Brecker’s tenor solo, the stated chords for which consist

merely of a repeated two-bar cycle: D triad for one bar, C triad for two beats, and G/B

and G/A for one beat each—all in 4/4 time.

Metheny’s decision to pare down the solo sections to these few simple chord

changes, rather than to require the musicians to negotiate the unusual structure of

the song’s A sections, clearly freed these players to stretch out. In particular, Brecker

foregoes tried-and-true devices. At the time of this recording, that saxophonist’s

reputation rested mainly on his position as co-leader of The Brecker Brothers, a funk

and fusion group, as well as his work as a top-tier session player. In those situations,

he demonstrated dazzling virtuosity and harmonic sophistication, while proving

himself a dependable font of concise, clean, and ‘‘soulful’’ passages. He could easily

have turned to such techniques here. Yet on ‘‘Folk Songs,’’ he steers clear of his

trademark licks, and focuses instead on vocal-like gestures reminiscent of African

American ‘‘New Thing’’ artists of the 1960s, such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah

Sanders.

Mention must be made of the stunning interaction among the rhythm section

players. As on ‘‘New Chautauqua,’’ Metheny opens ‘‘Folk Songs’’ with strummed

steel-stringed acoustic guitar. Again, prior to Metheny’s emergence, this technique

had been unknown in jazz contexts. Yet here, the timbre sounds absolutely

appropriate given the bare harmonic progression and Haden’s characteristically

unadorned bass lines. In a 1982 interview, Metheny said of the track, ‘‘I was thinking

… in terms of c&w [country and western].’’ He further noted that the tune ‘‘came

from an idea I had to get that real energetic strumming thing happening as a

rhythmic element for Jack [DeJohnette] and Charlie [Haden] to play against.’’56

Metheny’s accompanimental approach here certainly invigorates DeJohnette, whose

loose, kinetic drumming feels at times as if it will overwhelm the rest of the band, but

somehow remains under control and supportive. His drum solo (beginning around

56 Tim Schneckloth, ‘‘Pat Metheny: A Step Beyond Tradition,’’ DownBeat, November 1982, 16.


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the 10:20 mark) serves as a transition to ‘‘Old Joe Clark,’’ the second half of the

pairing (which begins 13:18). Haden’s austere statement of that song’s melody leads

the group toward a majestic march-like section for Metheny’s acoustic guitar solo

heading into a long, gradual diminuendo (perhaps a ‘‘board fade’’) as Haden returns

with the song’s theme.57

In other hands, ‘‘Two Folk Songs’’ could have come off as a trite nod to an

imagined rural utopian past. Thanks in large part to the contributions of Brecker,

Haden, and DeJohnette, the recording never feels like an attempt to re-create pastoral

days gone by. Instead, these players succeed in shaping their own vision by mediating

the two seemingly diametrically opposed worlds of modernist jazz and rural white

folk stylings. As noted, the Ornette Coleman Quartet had suggested such a

connection with ‘‘Ramblin’’’ in the late 1950s. But this ‘‘Two Folk Songs’’

performance goes beyond a mere reiteration of ‘‘Old Joe Clark,’’ enabling us to

hear Coleman’s 1959 cut in an entirely new way. By echoing that portion of

‘‘Ramblin’,’’ Metheny and his colleagues remind us that Coleman was not simply

playing at the cutting edge of the modernist avant garde, but rather he was also

simultaneously working through and giving voice to the deep, interwoven, and varied

rural roots of his (and also Haden’s) musical upbringing.

Of 80/81’s seven other selections, only ‘‘The Bat,’’ ‘‘Every Day (I Thank You),’’ and

‘‘Goin’ Ahead’’ draw directly on pastoral jazz timbres and harmonies (with the solo

guitar performance of the latter song returning us to the terrain of New Chautauqua,

by utilizing a gently finger-picked acoustic guitar and triadic harmony). But these

cuts, when placed alongside ‘‘Turnaround’’ (an Ornette Coleman-composed blues

head), ‘‘Open,’’ and ‘‘Pretty Scattered,’’ further contextualize and reinforce the

country/avant-garde associations laid down in ‘‘Two Folk Songs.’’58 Both ‘‘Open’’

and ‘‘Pretty Scared’’ feature saxophonist Dewey Redman, who, like Haden, was a

former sideman for both Coleman and Keith Jarrett. Significantly, Redman and

DeJohnette are the only two African American musicians on this album. Given the

strong rural-folk flavor of the record, the mere presence on these two men on the

58 Critic Gary Giddins has suggested that Metheny’s music from the 80/81 era was an attempted

‘‘syncretism’’ of Keith Jarrett and Ornette Coleman. See Giddins’s Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and

Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 56. The implied connection among Coleman,

Haden, Metheny, and DeJohnette became literal in 1986 when they all recorded Song X. Pat Metheny

and Ornette Coleman, Song X, Geffen-24096, 1991, compact disc. However, at the time of those later

sessions, the musicians seemed less interested in reexamining their shared interests in rural traditions and

more concerned with exploring the new sonic possibilities afforded by the emerging digital technology,

including Metheny’s Synclavier synthesizer and the electric drums played by the record’s other

percussionist, Denardo Coleman. In many ways, as a new kind of dense, angular, and loud ‘‘electric

jazz,’’ Song X serves as the antithesis to 80/81’s bucolic vision. Though Song X marks the only time that

Metheny recorded with Ornette Coleman, the guitarist has continued to play with both DeJohnette and,

more frequently, with Haden. Of particular relevance to this essay is Metheny and Haden’s 1997 CD

Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) (Verve 537130), the cover of which, in an apparent homage to the

musicians’ shared Show-Me State roots, features a photograph of a farmhouse draped by the pastel hues

of the heavens suggested in the album’s title.

57 The term ‘‘board fade’’ refers to a diminuendo that is controlled more by a sound engineer at the

mixing board (via volume faders) than by the musicians themselves.


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record’s inside cover photo destabilizes essentialized understandings of racial and

musical identity. By the time of this album’s release, popular conceptions of the geo-

cultural configuration of the United States had all but ossified into a ‘‘rural 5 white,

city 5 black’’ polarity.59 The inspired performances from Dewey Redman and Jack

DeJohnette, as well as those of the other participants here, disrupt such a binary,

recalling in many ways the close interaction of black and white vernacular musicians

in pre-Great Migration America—what Greil Marcus has called the ‘‘old, weird

America’’—where ‘‘hillbilly,’’ ‘‘blues,’’ ‘‘folk,’’ and ‘‘jazz’’ overlapped to a great

degree.60 In these ways, 80/81 encourages us to hear the rural United States, not as a

carefree, timeless, and exclusively white domain, but rather as a multifaceted,

unpredictable, ever-evolving, and occasionally beautifully tempestuous land.61

‘‘Garage’’ Band

I feel myself leaning all the time toward rock—not rock, exactly—but a moreAmerican influence, all the time.

Pat Metheny (1978)62

Lyle Mays, another Midwesterner (born 1952 in Wausau, Wisconsin) has served as

keyboardist and co-composer for the Pat Metheny Group since that ensemble’s

inception in the mid-1970s. Early on, Mays evinced an atypical jazz keyboard style.

Unlike the soloistic synthesizer playing of Jan Hammer, Herbie Hancock, Chick

Corea, and the other fusion proponents that preceded him, Mays predominantly

employs a warm timbre and sustained ‘‘pads.’’ Likewise, in his piano playing, Mays

rarely displays much of a bebop-inflected linear conception (here he differs from

Metheny, who can ‘‘run changes’’ with the best of them). Instead, his playing reveals

the unmistakable influence of Keith Jarrett’s American-pastoral-sounding work,

particularly in the way Mays emulates Jarrett’s propensity for triadic and ‘‘add 2’’

voicings. To further cement the connection to Keith Jarrett, Mays and Metheny

performed Jarrett’s composition ‘‘The Wind Up’’ in their Group’s live sets during the

1970s and early 1980s. In addition to the synthesizers and piano, Lyle Mays may be

the only jazz musician to have made the autoharp a permanent part of his

performance arsenal. Although used sparingly, that instrument’s shimmering

60 Greil Marcus, ‘‘The Old, Weird America,’’ in Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New

York: Henry Holt, 1997), 87–126.61 With regard to the blurring of Southern musical and cultural boundaries in the first decades of the

twentieth century, Harry Smith (editor of the folk revivalists’ bible, the Folkways boxed record set

Anthology of American Folk Music), recalled that ‘‘it took years before anybody discovered that [African

American guitarist] Mississippi John Hurt wasn’t a hillbilly.’’ Quoted in Marcus, Invisible Republic, 104.62 John Alan Simon, ‘‘Pat Metheny: Ready to Tackle Tomorrow,’’ DownBeat 45, July 13, 1978, 23.

59 This generalization is strongly supported by contemporary country/urban stereotypes on American

television in the 1970s. On the one hand, think of the television shows Green Acres or Petticoat Junction;

on the other, recall The Jeffersons, Good Times, or the fact that the radio industry’s ‘‘urban’’ format

designation referred almost exclusively to black artists.


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resonance blends well with Metheny’s guitar timbres and helped fortify the Group’s

rural idyllic passages.

The Pat Metheny Group released five albums for ECM between 1978 and 1985. Of

these, their eponymous first record (sometimes known as ‘‘The White Album’’) is

probably best known today. While that record features distinct pastoral jazz elements

(especially in ‘‘Phase Dance,’’ ‘‘Aprilwind,’’ and ‘‘April Joys’’), these traits are

decidedly more pronounced on the Group’s highly successful follow-up, American

Garage.63 Mays and Metheny collaborated as co-composers for four of the five

compositions on Garage, and their work together on this record represents a

markedly different take on the pastoral theme from that heard on the discs previously

discussed. For while American Garage definitely points away from the crowded

downtowns of the United States, it does not settle comfortably within either the

gentle acoustic confines of New Chautauqua or the fierce folk/blues/free-jazz

crossroads of 80/81.

The cover photo of American Garage features a grassy lot filled with postwar era

campers, the vehicles’ aluminum bodies glittering in the sun. Overhead, a gentle bank

of puffy white clouds frames an otherwise clear blue sky. Given popular

understandings in the United States of campers as the preferred mode of travel for

retirees and mild-mannered weekend vacationers, the use of this setting on the cover

of a jazz record is worth noting. Perhaps we are meant to understand the image as an

ironic critique of a tired and timid Middle America. If so, that message is lost, as

nothing in this placid setting suggests anything but a sincere homage to this area of

public life. (See Figure 4.)

The photo on the back of the record sleeve further helps to locate this recording,

both culturally and geographically. This shot depicts the Group apparently in

rehearsal. Rather than offering a glimpse of the quartet ‘‘behind the scenes’’ during an

actual session, we find a staged portrait of the musicians playing next to an old

station wagon in the garage of the album’s title. Note Lyle Mays’s placement in the

shot. In lieu of the usual array of instruments Mays used in the Group’s live shows,

we see only one humble electronic piano, with an amp serving as a stand. On top of

that keyboard sits a well-worn baseball glove with ball visible inside, as if Mays had

just come from a baseball diamond. (See Figure 5.)

Of course, the point of this photograph is not for us literally to consider Lyle Mays

or any of the other members of the band as dedicated baseball players. Rather, the

presence of this particular piece of sports equipment (i.e., a mitt, and not, say, a

rugby jersey) encourages perceptions of these four young, slightly shaggy men as the

newest incarnation of that gloriously all-American laboratory of post-War dreams:

the garage band. We are to believe that these young, white males—who in a slightly

earlier time would have covered the songs, sounds, and moves of rock ‘n’ roll—are

dreaming of jazz stardom. Like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and John Lennon in the

1950s and 1960s, the garage-band ideal is embodied in this group by the guitarist, Pat

63 Pat Metheny Group, Pat Metheny Group (ECM 1114, 1978, LP) and American Garage (ECM 1115,

1979, LP).


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Metheny, who, while not the front-most musician in the image, plainly stands out as

the leader here.

The visual garage-band motif finds its most clear sonic counterpart in the

introduction of the album’s title song. Drummer Danny Gottlieb slashes out four

measures of quarter notes on the half-open high-hat cymbals. This is followed by one

of the band members counting off in typically exuberant rock ‘n’ roll fashion—‘‘One.

Two. One, Two, Three, Four!’’ It is an intriguing gesture for a ‘‘jazz’’ album, one that

offers possibilities for a new kind of rock ‘n’ roll/jazz fusion, perhaps a ‘‘punk jazz.’’64

Yet, after an energetic enough opening section, the tune quickly falls into a restrained

melody over a light funk groove in G major. This texture is followed by a harmonic

progression that utilizes A-flat major seventh and G-flat major seventh chords,

sonorities that are considered ‘‘jazzy’’ in rock ‘n’ roll culture. The momentum does

Figure 4 Front album cover photo to Pat Metheny, Pat Metheny Group, American

Garage (1980). Image courtesy of ECM Records.

64 In fact, Metheny’s friend and former colleague, electric bassist Jaco Pastorius, had adopted that very

term to describe his own sound. Given Pastorious’s career and life paths, the label seems apt. See Bill

Milkowski, Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius, ‘‘The World’s Greatest Bass Player’’

(San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 1995).


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pick up again during Metheny’s impressive guitar solo—which features a brief nod to

the Beatles’ ‘‘Get Back’’—but the preceding sections had already tamed the track.65

Any connections from the song’s name and opening count-off to 1970’s garage-band

rock aesthetics—which valued transgressive ‘‘energy’’ and looseness above all—is

undermined by the Group’s clean and well-ordered rendition.

The title track is not the only innocuous performance on American Garage. Far

from the unguarded avant-folk abandon of 80/81, the entire record blithely celebrates

a safe and hospitable jazz soundscape, as far removed from a hardened dustbowl

terrain as it is from a smoky urban nightclub. The Mays/Metheny tune ‘‘Airstream,’’

named after the well-known brand of trailers, sounds like nothing less than a benign

tribute to the gently nomadic lifestyle of the tourists who inhabit the vehicles pictured

on the album cover. Every moment of American Garage—from the jangling

Hollywood-western, Copland-esque open-fifths-and-octaves introduction of ‘‘(Cross

the) Heartland’’ to the multi-sectional ‘‘grandeur’’ of ‘‘The Epic’’—seems to affirm a

decidedly Middle-American brand of optimism.

To jazz listeners today, American Garage’s earnestness may feel forced and

overblown, much like the highly orchestrated festivities that surrounded the 1976

commemoration of the nation’s Bicentennial a few years before the record’s release.

Still, this album must certainly have sounded refreshing for many at that time. How

65 The Beatles, ‘‘Get Back,’’ Let It Be, Parlophone/Capitol 46447, 1970, LP.

Figure 5 Back album cover photo to Pat Metheny Group, American Garage (1980).

Image courtesy of ECM Records.


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else to explain the fact that Garage topped Billboard magazine’s jazz charts in 1980?66

Given its success, the album’s importance, then and since, should not be

underestimated, for here we see evidence of a consequential shift in jazz’s literal

and figurative place in the United States.

I mentioned at the outset that the traditional narrative of jazz history holds that the

music traveled from city to city. I have also noted a few examples of a deeply rural

strain that emerged during the 1970s and after. But in American Garage and the many

similar efforts it inspired, we find jazz tracing a third path, one right next door to the

music’s traditional centers yet at the same time safely removed from those locations.

These records announce a metaphorical migration for at least one segment of jazz

and its audiences, a migration that echoes the actual movement of large portions of

American society after World War II: the exodus to suburbia. Like its correlate

among the general population of the United States, this phenomenon is a decidedly

‘‘white flight’’ from the city.

It is worth recalling that the 1970s witnessed a particularly troubled period for U.S.

cities, illustrated most clearly by the infamous October 30, 1975, New York Daily

News headline: ‘‘Ford to City: Drop Dead.’’67 The urban troubles of this era are also

readily reflected in the many photographic and video images of Los Angeles engulfed

by smog, or stories of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire. It is no surprise that

many Americans at that time, of all ages and backgrounds, placed their hopes and

dreams somewhere other than the nation’s urban centers.

Even some New York-based jazz musicians began to question their living

situations. Those so inclined and who could afford to leave The Apple—including

both Metheny and Jarrett—headed to smaller towns in upstate New York or in

Pennsylvania or New Jersey.68 Those jazz musicians who stuck it out in the boroughs

of New York City faced an increasingly difficult work situation, as clubs closed or

presented other forms of music. Some of these players, like the saxophonist Sam

Rivers, began producing their own shows in New York’s former warehouse spaces.

The ‘‘loft scene’’ that emerged gave voice to the era’s many anxieties, producing an

edgy, free jazz-inspired, sound, with a decidedly Afrocentric orientation.

67 With New York City facing possible bankruptcy in the middle 1970s, Mayor Abraham Beame

requested ‘‘bail-out’’ funds from the federal government. The headline in the Daily News paraphrased

Ford’s negative response.68 Both Jarrett and Metheny were among those who decided to forego city living, with Metheny settling

for a time in Woodstock, New York, and Jarrett moving to rural New Jersey. In addition, Dave Holland,

Jack DeJohnette, and a host of others also settled in Woodstock. Steve Coleman and Fred Hersch

maintain at least a part-time residence in eastern Pennsylvania. Dave Liebman, Phil Woods, and others

reside in the Delaware Water Gap. And, as previously noted, Bill Frisell left New York City for a much-

less-densely populated—though still undeniably urban—area, Seattle.

66 Not all jazz critics were appreciative of American Garage’s secure terrain. Elaine Guregian lamented

that ‘‘by relieving their audience of effort, Metheny and Mays also deprive us of the pleasure of surprise

and the possibility of inspiration.’’ She concludes, ‘‘Metheny fans may be satisfied with this sleek effort

but I don’t think they should be. It is a shame for Metheny and the rest of the group to waste so much

talent on artifice.’’ ‘‘Record Reviews: Pat Metheny Group, American Garage,’’ DownBeat, April, 1980,

42.


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In contrast to these sober, even bleak, scenarios, The Pat Metheny Group’s ECM

releases such as American Garage offered a vision of a clean and secure jazz world.

White suburban teens heeded the call, buying records and filling seats—no mean feat

for jazz at the time. Metheny’s appeal to white audiences and his group’s ‘‘white

sound’’ was not lost on the jazz press. Commenting on the Pat Metheny Group in

DownBeat shortly before the release of New Chautauqua, the critic Neil Tesser wrote,

‘‘it is a matter, I think, not of white musicians asserting their paleness or some such

nonsense, rather it is a matter of no longer apologizing for this background, as white

musicians have felt more free about incorporating their separate roots into

improvisational music.’’69 Tesser also noted some discussion of the time that

foresaw Pat Metheny becoming ‘‘the Brubeck of the 80s.’’ ‘‘Like Brubeck,’’ Tesser

explained, ‘‘Metheny offers a driving, valid, and determinedly white music; like

Brubeck, he has counted on college audiences as a major constituency in the early

part of his journey, and has already begun to exert considerable influence on

developing guitarists and composers.’’70

In Metheny and his bandmates, white, post-Watergate, suburban youth found for

the first time a jazz role model in their own image: raised on rock ‘n’ roll, but now

slightly ‘‘above’’ it; long-haired, but not chronically alienated, and almost certainly

college bound. For these young people, this suburbanized pastoral jazz offered a

degree of the hipness still associated with jazz’s outsider status, but without the

dangers (real or imagined) of the city versions of the genre.71 Eventually, scores of

other musicians and record companies followed Metheny’s ECM sound, helping to

shape the subgenre eventually known as smooth jazz. But this is not the only legacy of

the guitarist’s Americanized pastoral styles.72

69 Neil Tesser and Fred Bourque, ‘‘Pat Metheny: Musings on Neo Fusion,’’ DownBeat, March 12, 1979,

12.70 Ibid. Dave Brubeck’s lineage reaches back to England and Germany, but also to Modoc Indian

peoples. Despite this ancestry, Brubeck is typically understood as a ‘‘white musician.’’ For a discussion

of the Native American Indian lineage in Brubeck and other jazz musicians including, Jim Hall, Ed

Thigpen, Oscar Pettiford, and many others, see the chapter ‘‘The Man on the Buffalo Nickel: Dave

Brubeck,’’ in Gene Lees, Cats of Any Color: Jazz, Black and White (New York: Oxford University Press,

1995).71 For more on race and popular perceptions of jazz and jazz musicians, see, again, Ingrid Monson, ‘‘The

Problem with White Hipness,’’ Jon Panish, The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American

Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), and Krin Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz

and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).72 Hard data has been surprisingly difficult to come by, but my hunch is that the many largely unknown

‘‘Metheny clones’’—young guitarists who emulated Metheny’s sound and style—and other young

instrumentalists around this time also helped to fuel the remarkable expansion of ‘‘jazz education’’ in the

United States. Although the first major jazz-oriented programs in this country’s colleges date to the mid-

1950s, supported in large measure by campus visits from bandleaders Stan Kenton, Woody Herman,

and Dave Brubeck, the growth rate of such programs picked up considerable steam only during the

1970s and 1980s, that is, as Metheny and similarly minded musicians rose to prominence. By that time,

America’s suburban youth were expected to attend college to study something. Through the de-

urbanization (and whitening) of jazz, Middle America found a newly acceptable musical genre for study.

On one hand, jazz had become virtuosic, complex, and ‘‘serious’’ enough to warrant attention by music

faculty; on the other hand, it was also close enough to home—stylistically, geographically, and

culturally—to feel safe and comfortable for rock-nurtured students and their parents. With this rapidly


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In such ways, Metheny’s suburban-American pastoral jazz reflected the hopes and

fears of the nation’s young white middle-class. No doubt, it was just this geo-cultural

shift that inspired some of the backlash by jazz ‘‘neoclassicists’’ throughout the 1990s

and into the new millennium (both Jarrett and Metheny are conspicuously absent

from Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary, for which Wynton Marsalis served as a primary

consultant). While we can understand and even applaud the efforts of Marsalis,

Stanley Crouch, and likeminded individuals toward reminding the nation of jazz’s

distinguished black American urban legacy (with Lincoln Center being the most

visible symbol of their success), we should also note that the neoclassicists’ other

agenda—to elevate jazz’s place on America’s cultural ladder equal to that of European

classical music—probably could not have succeeded without first establishing a

foothold in the nation’s Heartland. This move, I offer, was accelerated by the rise of

Americanized pastoral jazz in the 1970s and 1980s.

Conclusion

An idealization of rural and wilderness spaces has a tradition in American arts and

letters dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Although jazz has generally been

thought of in urban cultural contexts, there is a strain of the music that builds upon

and expresses the impulses of this pastoral ideal. I have noted that the recent work of

Norah Jones, Bill Frisell, and others to bring together elements of jazz with country

and other rural-associated genres has important precedents in the music of Pat

Metheny and Keith Jarrett for ECM Records in the 1970s and 1980s. However, my

point here has not simply been to ‘‘give credit where credit is due’’ or even to make

the case that Jarrett and Metheny were the sole creators of the new sound (we have

already noted Gary Burton’s role; Paul Winter, Paul Bley, the group Oregon, Mark

Johnson, and others also contributed), but rather to explore how these jazz musicians

evoked non-urban spaces—and, more important, to understand the social and

cultural dimensions of the music’s short but consequential passage from the

American city.

expanded college presence, jazz acquired some of the patina of respectability and sophistication enjoyed

by the other disciplines on campus. Not that college music programs always offered the type of jazz that

the new generation of students desired. While the Berklee College of Music and a handful of others

programs adjusted their curricula to accommodate students’ interest in Metheny’s music, many schools

continued to stress Kenton-type big band sounds or emphasized bebop-oriented small ensembles, so

students often had to form their own groups outside of class. See Jas Obrecht, ‘‘Berklee Guitar Programs,

Q/A: Bill Leavitt, Author/Educator,’’ Guitar Player (October 1983), 26. Over time, those who studied

jazz in the 1970s and 1980s have landed teaching positions, and this new generation of jazz faculty has

worked to reshape the curricula, if only by demanding a ‘‘hipper’’ style of big band chart. Arrangers have

taken notice, and by the turn of this century dozens of arrangements of Pat Metheny tunes had become

available for sale to college and high school ensembles. Trombonist and arranger Bob Curnow, an

alumnus of the Stan Kenton band, has even released a CD of Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays compositions

arranged in the Kenton band’s signature ‘‘big-brass’’ style. Bob Curnow’s L.A. Big Band, The Music of

Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays (Mama Foundation 1048929, 1995). I welcome hard evidence scholars and

educators either supporting or disputing my claims about the Metheny’s influence on jazz education.


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More to the point: race matters in this discussion, as it always does in jazz, and it is

no accident that white musicians and fans have been the primary drivers of this

subgenre. With few exceptions, black musicians have not engaged in the pastoral jazz

idiom.73 For many African Americans throughout the twentieth century and beyond,

the city has represented opportunity, just as the farm or field often brought to mind a

repulsive past, where one typically remained poor while working somebody else’s

land. This held true not only for generations of jazz musicians from the South, but

also for Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and so many other black blues men and

women who left the Mississippi Delta for Chicago and other places ‘‘up the road.’’

In the final analysis, this mythologizing or imaging of an idyllic America in the

1970s and 1980s can be understood alternately as a reawakening of a long pastoral

tradition, a newly found respect for a fragile planet, a return to one’s musical and

cultural ‘‘roots,’’ or a disillusionment with and escape from degraded urban centers.

Drawing a large following of white listeners and musicians, this metaphorical move—

though largely overlooked by scholars and critics—has profoundly shaped the look

and sound of the music ever since.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful for the perceptive comments I have received on early versions of

this paper from David Borgo, Michael Branch, Larry Engstrom, Charles Hiroshi

Garrett, Daniel Goldmark, Dana Gooley, Louis Niebur, and Robert Walser, as well as

the journal’s editors and anonymous readers.

Abstract

Jazz has long been identified as an urban genre. Certainly, the standard historical

narratives of the music trace a metropolitan lineage: New Orleans to Chicago to

Kansas City to New York, with other cities, inside and outside the U.S., playing

somewhat lesser roles. In many ways, experts and laypeople alike have understood the

music as not only presented predominantly in urban areas, but also as among the

foremost aural representations of city living. Using such historical contexts as a

backdrop, this article addresses the emergence of a decidedly different geo-cultual

milieu for jazz, one that, while sometimes physically composed, performed, or

distributed in cities, evokes an idyllic America far from the bustle and hum of the

metropolis. The essay focuses particular attention on the key roles played by two

U.S.-born musicians—Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny—in shaping an idealized

notion of non-urban spaces in the 1970s and 1980s.

73 One of those exceptions is Afternoon of a Georgia Faun from African-American saxophonist Marion

Brown. Brown recorded that disc for ECM Records. Marion Brown, Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, ECM

1004, 1971, LP.


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The Emergence of the Rural American Ideal in Jazz

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