Why is Pat Metheny cranking out white noise now?

His stuff now is like snow on the TV set. No structure, no key signature, no modulations....just aimless. Why?

I LOVE the Map of the World Soundtrack, We Live Here, Secret Story, One Quiet Night, and even some of his old stuff on ECM.

What I've heard of it is far from structureless. Perhaps you're not used to hearing his more complex compositions?

For one thing, in this format there is no other harmonic instrument laying down the chords underneath the melodies of the songs, but they are there none the less.

Metheny has always been a big fan of the work of Ornette Coleman who wrote and improvised mostly in groups without guitar or piano players.

The first Pat Metheny album in 1975 had a cover medley of a couple of Ornette Coleman tunes.

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LP: Your musical direction has been tremendously diverse. When you first realized that you wanted to create musically, was your vision and musical philosophy as diverse as what your work has become? How has it changed?

PM: Pretty early on I had a strong sense of what kinds of things I wanted to do. It seemed to me that that there were huge areas that I was interested in that were fertile zones for study and research. The "diversity" of it is something that gets talked about a lot, but for me it is all of a piece. It is all music that I love and feel close to. I have always just wanted to represent myself honestly as a musician. To edit out huge areas of interest in the name stylistic "purity" (an impossibility anyway when it comes to jazz) would have not be a good course for me, since musical honestly is at the top of the list for me as a fan and hopefully as a player. As time has gone on, there are some things that have changed, but mostly the general approach to it all has remained constant. The main difference is that I can get to much more stuff more consistently now than I could when I first started out.

LP: Jazz can require musicians to take a number of risks in their careers and you have taken many. What have you learned about both music and yourself?

PM: Risk taking is at the core of it all. And those risks may be subtle ones that fall well below the radar of other people's perceptions or they may be overt career ones like what you are talking about. For me, I have always been pretty stubborn about wanting to sound a certain way and play a certain way that would allow me access to the maximum amount of stuff that I love about music in general. It is hard to see such a rather inclusive view of music as being that risky or radical, but in fact the general urge to dismantle the stratification's that rule the status quo ultimately do bear out to be controversial at the minimum to some folks, outright blasphemous to others.

What I have learned is that all you really know is what you love - and that can be the only compass that one should use to guide oneself. As soon as you give the aesthetic reins of power to an audience, other musicians, a critic, the guy sitting in the third row, your girlfriend, your boss - you have crossed a line that is difficult to recover from. To me, the goal would be to render an honest musical response the opportunities that each moment in sound offers that is effective at making that music sound the best that it possibly can sound. Is there a risk in that? Yes, in the reconciliation of your own personal aesthetic with the specific realities of what is actually going on right then on the bandstand around you. The risk is ALWAYS there, along with the opportunities

Sometimes you can only see the context looking backwards. But that's okay.

I stand corrected.
I was thinking of Speaking of Now. I listened to some samples of Day Trip. That is good stuff.

So anyway, why is Pat Metheny cranking out white noise like Speaking of Now, instead of structured stuff?


My original question stands.

didn't they? :)
"Oh no...Miles has gone crazy!!!"

I was mistaken.