ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL - GUITAR MAVEN PAT METHENY SPEAKS TO SJF ABOUT HIS NEW UNITY GROUP

Written by Charles WaringFriday, 31 January 2014 12:14 - Last Updated Friday, 31 January 2014 12:32

PAT METHENY can play music in any style - be it jazz (the straight ahead, free and fusionvarieties), rock, movie soundtracks or even pop - and put his own indelible stamp on it. He's amusical shape-shifter who during his storied 39-year career has proved that variety really is thespice of life. Given his predilection for being unorthodox and thinking out of the box, it came asa surprise, then, that in 2012 he made a recording that utilised a conventional jazz quartetfeaturing contemporary tenor saxophone colossus, Chris Potter. That record - 'Unity Band' -won the prolific guitarist the twentieth Grammy of his career. Though followed up by acompletely different project - 2013's 'Tap: John Zorn's Book Of Angels, Vol. 20,' dominated bysequencers and electronic gadgetry - the Unity Band has reconvened for a follow-up called'Kin.' It's quite different, though, from the quartet's debut. Also, the band has expanded to aquintet via the valuable acquisition of pianist/multi-instrumentalist, Giulio Carmassi, promptingMetheny to rename them Unity Group.

The amiable, eternally-curious, 59-year-old guitarist/composer was recently in London topromote his new recording and spoke at length to SJF's Charles Waring. He talked about hisnew recording venture for Nonesuch and also shared his thoughts about some of his otherprojects as well as the relationship between music-making and technology...

 

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ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL - GUITAR MAVEN PAT METHENY SPEAKS TO SJF ABOUT HIS NEW UNITY GROUP

Written by Charles WaringFriday, 31 January 2014 12:14 - Last Updated Friday, 31 January 2014 12:32

 

Tell me the story behind your new Unity Group album 'Kin.'

A couple of years ago I sat back for a second and looked across all this range of recordings thatI've made over the years and it was a little stunning to me that out of all those records that I hadreally done just one record that was more or less a classic rhythm section plus a horn playerkind of record, which was (the ECM album) '80/81' (featuring tenor saxophonists DeweyRedman and Michael Brecker).  I'd been so busy being involved with coming up with all thesealternative type concepts and having different kinds of bands and really looking just at all thedifferent kinds of ways I could be a band leader and conceptual things that were interesting tome. I just sort of neglected a little bit doing those kinds of records. And also, maybe, I waswaiting 30 years for Chris Potter to show up (laughs). Certainly, he inspired me the same waythat (Michael) Brecker and Dewey (Redman) did back then: to write a bunch of music that hadthat kind of central sonic destination; that thing that you can only get with a really great tenor(saxophone) player.

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ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL - GUITAR MAVEN PAT METHENY SPEAKS TO SJF ABOUT HIS NEW UNITY GROUP

Written by Charles WaringFriday, 31 January 2014 12:14 - Last Updated Friday, 31 January 2014 12:32

So we made that record ('Unity Band') and it was quite a successful record; it won a Grammyfor Best Jazz Record but the real story is we that did a tour. The tour that followed the release ofthat record was about 100 gigs around the world and it just kept getting better and better andbetter. And as a bandleader, I'm extra sensitive to the kinds of connections that are being madeoff the bandstand as well as on the bandstand and this happened to be a very well-balancedgroup of personalities. Everybody got along really good and we just had a lot of fun together.When you get to do that many gigs by the time that you get to the last ten or so it can be acountdown: like OK, I'm almost done with this. But this was sort of the opposite. It was likewe've only got three gigs to go and it's going to be so sad to see it end. We all had this feelingto keep going and I had plans to do something else and was itching to write some music thatwas a little bit broader in its compositional range; like the stuff I did with my regular band orprojects like 'Secret Story' or 'Orchestrion' - a kind of compositional sensibility that goes beyondjust being a tune. Then I started thinking: well, okay, if we're going to do this again - and I'musing the word 'unity' a lot, which I did feel was a good word for that band - maybe there wouldbe a way to really broaden it out further and incorporate this bigger picture of all these differentkinds of things, including the Orchestrion and including the elements of electronics that havealways been a big part of my thing for the last 30 years in other settings (like synths andsequencers and all that stuff). And I thought also, if I am going to go to that bigger, broadersound I'm going to need a least one more musician, maybe two. And right around that sametime I got a phone call from Will Lee, great bass player, kind of unrelated, saying: "there's thisnew guy here in New York who is super-talented but nobody seems to quite know what to dowith him. But he keeps saying that his main goal in life is to be in one of your bands or to be onone of your projects." And I was like, cool! What is he? He said: "he's a piano player and he's asinger but he plays saxophone, trumpet, flute and cello." I said now wait a minute, what? Who isthis? It turns out to be this guy Giulio Carmassi, who's perfect for me. He's not exactly an improviser but I don't really need another soloist. I've got Chris Potter, so Ireally just needed somebody who was a great musician who really understood this dialect withinthe music. So with Giulio and all these other elements and this slamming quartet thing right inthe middle of it, that had evolved over this time, it really seemed a really great palette of thingsto try to build into something altogether. The result is this record ('Kin') where I shifted the nameover to Unity Group, to imply this broader thing somehow. So I've got these two records withessentially the same core group of people but they are very, very different kinds of records. I'vebeen describing it - and maybe you've seen this in the press too - but I think it's a good way tolook at it: if the first record was like a black-and-white documentary - which it kind of was, agroup of guys in the studio playing tunes down - this one is kind of really more the 3-D, IMAX,Technicolor version of that. It's got a lot of texture to it as well. Yes, texture and the kind of dramatic type stuff which I felt very comfortable with in other areasbut have never quite reconciled with this kind of thing. What does Giulio bring that you didn't have before? Well, I write everything on piano. It's just easier for me to go on the piano. It's an instrument thatis designed to develop ideas in a way. The guitar has a lot of idiosyncrasies that are great butwith piano it's a much more neutral environment. So for me there is always a process of once Iwrite something on the piano I have to transfer it over to the guitar and the guitar, bass, drumssound of the rhythm section has one thing that's really cool about it: it's very open. But it doesn'thave the same kind of richness and density. It doesn't take up the same kind of space thatpiano does so just kind of right off the bat, Giulio's a very good piano player so those things thatI'd written that were very dense and thick could remain dense and thick: they didn't have to getreduced down to a guitar version of that. We're talking about a guy who can play all thesedifferent instruments and also he's a great singer, which has been an element that I have kindof utilised fairly often over the years as an ensemble sound so he's a bit of a natural fit for thekind of things that I write. How would you describe the recording process for the new album? How did it evolve inthe studio? The 'Unity Band' record was the classic I wrote a bunch of tunes, we'll rehearse for a day andtomorrow we'll go into studio and record half of them on the first day, half of them on the secondday and then take a day or so away and mix it and that's it. This record took two weeks just torecord the parts. It's a totally different kind of process to get this result. It was also a matter ofdiscovering the music as we went. It wasn't the kind of thing where we could just rehearse itdown and then play it. We really had to fine tune it as we were recording it, just to find out whatit is. There are several layers of technology involved in this that were not there on the firstrecord at all - I mean in terms of sequencers and all the materials that for me I'm very familiarwith and  which I've used on many of my other projects and which I've always kept a little bit outof the realm of what I might do on a project with this kind of instrumentation. This time I not onlyutilised them but I went at them full force. So it's a different kind production. So it's a hybrid of different things... It really is. And that was the challenge and also the fun of it. I think that the result of it issomething that it's hard to place it on the spectrum of stuff. It's already carved out its own littlevibe in the panorama of the things that I've done. Do you come into the studio with notated lead sheets to give to your players? Oh yeah. (Laughs). The first tune I think is 34 pages of written material. It's a massive thing.This kind of thing is not the sort of thing that you say "Ben (Ben Williams, bassist), okay, youplay in F" and "Ok, now Tony (drummer, Antonio Sanchez) you do a little groove" and turn onthe tape and let's go. I've certainly done records like that but this is a very detailed thing and thewhole idea of putting a lot of written material side-by-side with a lot of space for people toimprovise is a challenging thing that has been a subject of interest for me right from thebeginning. When I decided to start my own band that was one of the things I particularly wantedto investigate: what could you do with a small group of people now that's different than in anytime in history? Some of that had to do with the technology that was available and which I havenever had any fear of. To me it's really, absolutely, a worthwhile destination to try and find away of making all these things compatible.    

Yes, you seem to have wholeheartedly embraced technology while some of your peershave rejected it out of hand. Well, yeah, but on the other hand it's not like a piano grows out in the forest by itself, you know.The saxophone and trumpet either. The actual fact is that musical instrument technology on allfronts has a lot to do with music that each culture has produced. The technology of the timebecomes ultimately the platform that a lot of people who become musicians need to operatewithin in order to do their thing. As it happens, in my case I kind of chronologically paralleledwhat will kind of go down in history as one of the major periods of musical instrument evolutionuntil now. I mean what has happened over the last 40 years in terms of what you can do as amusician, of course using electronics primarily; it's like the Industrial Revolution. It's just likethere was a way of doing it before and then everything changed in a massive kind of way. AndI've been on the front line for that whole thing. A couple of albums ago you pioneered the orchestrion (on the album, 'Orchestrion') amind-boggling orchestral version of the Player Piano. That seemed like a crazy ideainitially. Did it seem to you outlandish to put such a thing together? Well, if there was any remaining doubt that I am slightly a weird guy that project put that to restonce and for all. Do you think that you will revisit the orchestrion in the future? Well, you know, on the other hand, my interest in that was really born out of exactly what wewere talking about just before - which is I have lived on the frontline of all this tech stuff and yes,I have lived in the world of speakers from day one. I often joke: my first musical act was to plugit in, you know. Knowing about cables and knobs and power amps and pre-amps and all thisstuff is like what reeds and mouthpieces are like for horn players. This has been the thing. But Ihave also recognised what all of this is: this includes your readership. We're talking aboutspeakers. We're talking about sound coming out of speakers - whether it's 24-bit, 16-bit, 96K,whatever. We're talking about something that is the speaker vibrating in the air. As a guitarplayer, yes, me too; I'm there with amps and everything that can go between the guitar and theamp and I'm down with all of that. But I also know very well the feeling of sitting in a room andplaying acoustic guitar and what happens and what that is and how that is different than anyway than that gesture can ever be rendered through a speaker. And as much there are waysthat you can interface the two, they are fundamentally different things. I love the front end of the21st century. I love being able to manipulate music the way that we can with a computer using aprogramme like Sibelius. I love having platforms like Pro Tools and Digital Performer, all thesethings. I love that and that's great but the output side of it has not changed for decades now.And that output is speakers. I really feel that there will be a way to have output at some point - Idon't know if it will be in my lifetime or my kids' lifetime - and it will not be speakers. It will be adifferent way of doing it. The orchestrion for me is in many ways connected to the thing thathappened right before speakers which was Player Pianos. That was the first time the composercould offer his music to a room full of people and not be there. And that particular output device,a player piano, is one that was almost immediately completely abandoned when recordedsound emerged. It was sort of like: "oh, ok, we can do this with microphones, speakers andmagnetic analogue representations of sound. This is the way to go." For me, that idea of havingthe player piano be an output device for your musical ideas is still a very rich way of thinkingabout what it is to be a musician or a composer. My idea with the orchestrion was what elsecould I manifest in a way that doesn't use a speaker but is acoustic in nature? And, you know, Ikind of followed this world closely over the years: I learned that there were these hipster guys inBrooklyn who thought that they were making robotic instruments and then there were these oldguys who were still making replacement parts for the original orchestrions, which were sort ofthe next stage after player pianos. They're all doing the same thing even though none of themthink that they're doing the same thing but they really are and I kind of gathered together what tome were the best, most viable, mechanical ways of doing this and organising them together anddid that record and that tour. Yes, now that I've done it, and the other nine people on the planetwho are building instruments along these lines - who also weren't really aware of what otherpeople were doing but somehow became aware of my thing and saw it kind of like in the zone ofwhat they were doing... I'd love to gather those instruments together in addition to what I'vealready got and so now I know a lot more about how to do it. So yeah, maybe in four or fiveyears I'll do a whole other project but in the meantime it has become sort of a viable part of theplatform for me: it's all over this John Zorn record that came out earlier ('Tap: John Zorn's BookOf Angels, Vol. 20'). And it's all over this new record. It's even in the first Unity Band record in akind of improvisational way. So yeah, it's in there for me. So what's in the pipeline after this album because you seem to be a guy who's severalsteps ahead of his listeners in terms of your musical direction. I've found that it is best to wait until the thing is really the thing before saying what it's going tobe. I mean, you're right: I've got a million ideas... I always have a lot of ideas. On the otherhand, what I'm really looking at right now is that we're going to do about 200 concerts aroundthe world so I'm kind of shifting over now from the conceptualist zone to the execution zone andalso, in a lot of ways that's the most fun part and the easiest part for me. When you're sitting in aroom trying to come up with ideas and writing music and trying to formulate some new platformfor doing something in, it's like you're in a room by yourself and hoping you're coming up withideas and when you make a record now you've got a community of a few guys and you're thereand working on the record and it still sort of a thing. But then when you go play, there are allthese people that come and they are bringing a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Then the gigstarts and you do your best and then the gigs over and you don't have to worry about anythinguntil the gig tomorrow night. That's part of the attraction for me of going out on the road andplaying a lot is that it starts a life of its own. It's the icing on the cake for me. What's been the highlight of your career so far? Well, you know, man, it's so hard to say because I've had so many great experiences playing, inmany ways, with the greatest musicians of our time - or at least my favourite musicians outthere. If you see the list of the guys that I've done something with (which includes everyone fromOrnette Coleman and Chick Corea to Joni Mitchell and David Bowie) it's also a list of myfavourite musicians; of guys that I'm the biggest fan of. So I couldn't really single out anything.To me, it's all been one big long thing. It's all connected and each aspect of it has really justbeen fantastic for me so it's like that. 'KIN' BY THE PAT METHENY UNITY GROUP IS RELEASED BY NONESUCH ON 3RDFEBRUARY 2014  

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ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL - GUITAR MAVEN PAT METHENY SPEAKS TO SJF ABOUT HIS NEW UNITY GROUP

Written by Charles WaringFriday, 31 January 2014 12:14 - Last Updated Friday, 31 January 2014 12:32

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