Spread the Social Love:

Pay Metheny Group - Imaginary Day [LIVE DVD]

EV Classics

by derrider, September 5th, 2010 and has been Read 2496 times.
Last Edited by: Chris MUG5 Maguire September 5th, 2010.

Pat Metheny is an acknowledged legend in jazz circles. Undeniably a prodigy, he was teaching at Berklee College of music when he was just eighteen years old, playing on his first recording (with Jaco Pastorius) two years later. The Pat Metheny Group is Metheny’s more easy-listening project; it has become so popular that it could be argued that it is now his main focus.

First off, it’s worth delineating that this is probably the type of thing that (you might think) your parents are more likely to enjoy. The music, which is solely instrumental, is incredibly well arranged and constructed, actually staggeringly so. Unfortunately, the whole easy-listening, pop-jazz thing has become a rather diluted genre with so many lazy, incompetent free-rollers that the people still pulling it off with such aplomb, as Metheny and his cohorts do, are immediately on a back foot for most younger listeners. Yes, it doesn’t help that there is some bad hair and equally dubious shirts mixed in with the occasional eighties square-wave synths, but these can be looked past, probably.

The venue they are playing in at The Mountain Winery, Saratoga, California, is utterly spectacular. They are rather lucky that they could find a spot there to set up – they have a veritable music warehouse of kit! Two musicians of the band of seven are multi-instrumentalists, playing all sorts of miscellaneous percussion instruments to guitars, trumpets and even melodica! In addition to this, the keyboardist has four keyboards – yes, he does a solo where he switches between each frenetically – whilst Metheny himself uses fretless, synth and multi-harp, gazillion-string guitars. As he explains on the bonus interview, Metheny is aware that they are working in a genre in which technology is exploited veraciously. He states that the band tries to “address some specific aspects of pop music and the particular culture at large. (With) this record we really wanted to expand the range of sonic elements beyond anything we’d ever tried before…” Well, a hanger full of instruments ought to do it.

Jovial musings aside, the sound the band makes is quite astonishing in its versatility and complementarity. Each band member really is contributing to a greater whole, with the face and ‘image’ of popular music, or even a majority of jazz-pop, extracted completely. There is a great feeling of warmth emanating from the band as they play and an obvious real love for the music is presented, a very nice thing to behold indeed. They float through the horizontally-relaxed ‘Follow Me’, gallop through the flamenco-inspired ‘Heat of they Day’ and later get surprisingly rocky and upbeat with ‘The Roots of Coincidence’ which may well be the standout performance.

One thing that does slightly detract from the viewing experience of the DVD is the occasionally amateurish insistence of the direction and editing by Steve Rodby, who is also the bass player. I have seen this before: members of a band decide that they should try their hand at editing - it almost always ends up being a primitive effects-laden, slow motion, split-screen exploration which is at times rather testing. This, however, does not take anything away from the music - it is pop-jazz fusion of the highest quality. It’s worth checking out even for the level of attainment and sheer dexterity that a live band is capable of given a few kitchen sinks and a presumably gargantuan touring team.

At least they are talented enough to make the most of it.