I never traveled far to hear the great Pat Metheny perform. I never had to. The damn guy, that slack-jawed Midwestern jazz yokel in his striped shirts and his running shoes, kept coming to watch me listen. And if you check the records of the theaters and clubs near everywhere you’ve ever lived, you will probably find he’s been stalking you, too, for the better part of five decades.
Pat Metheny performs at the Bardavon Theater on April 13 at 8 p.m.
When I went away to SUNY Brockport, it was the 80/81 band in the campus ballroom: Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian. The nusic was a little over the head of this 18-year-old. When I transferred to SUNY Oswego, it was the (ah!) classic Pat Metheny Group (PMG) in the nearby Landmark Theater in Syracuse.
That was the one time I met him. I made a joke, and he laughed.
Over intersession, it was version 1.5 of the PMG (the transitional Offramp lineup) in the dimly lit and darkly reverberant Vassar Chapel. When I graduated and returned to the Hudson Valley, it was the fully formed v.2 of the PMG (Rodby/Wertico/Aznar, for those keeping score) at The Chance of all places, making that notoriously difficult room sound like Bayreuth.
Over the years, several visits to the Bardavon followed, including an especially memorable quartet show with the Brad Mehldau t rio.
And I’ll be at the Bardavon when Pat brings his true solo guitar tour to town. One guitar in a 900-seat theater? I am unconcerned. As a provider of a live music experience, Metheny never disappoints.
It all started between us in the late Seventies in what is now called the Studley Theater at SUNY New Paltz, a five-minute walk — via grassy shortcuts and private driveways — from my uptown New Paltz home. I was a teenager whose ears were just beginning to open to jazz and fusion. That first PMG record — the White Album, the other White Album — was at that precise moment my very favorite thing in the world, a game-changing, luminous record that levitated off the jazz charts and into the Billboard top 50 (perhaps following the rather shocking commercial success of his ECM labelmate Keith Jarrett’s The Koln Concert).
Those perfect-storm alignments are rare: going to see the artist himself perform the music that is already playing involuntarily in your head throughout the day and in your young, wet brain’s vibrant dreaming at night. That Studley Theater show lives on for me as a preserved — nay, an illumined memory — brighter than life, due in part to one of the many ways in which Pat Metheny departed from jazz customs. He embraced a rock theatricality that many austere jazz artists, mainstream and avant, abjure, favoring the default jazz visuals and values of the smoky club or the black-tie concert-hall setting. Metheny took the transportative, world-making part of concerts seriously, even as he dressed jazz, down to striped shirts and running shoes.
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