The music of the ambitious guitarist Pat Metheny and his subsequent bands and collaboration projects has been a very interesting.
I’ve collected his entire catalog which spans over an impressive 40 year period, I evered actually seen him perform live in concerts in Tbilisi jazz festival 2019, RP of Georgia, with contrabassist Darek Oleszkiewitcz and great drummer Jonathan Barber. And the second day Pat Metheny with Tbilisi simphony orchestra “Missouri Skies and More”, Conductor – Vakhtang Kakhidze.
As far as performance goes, each member surpassed my expectation with his or her ability to blend to Pat Metheny’s overall style. With that being said, playing with a legend like Pat Metheny is a huge accomplishment within itself, and I’m looking forward to watching her career progress in the future.
For his own part, Pat Metheny seemed to be acting as a conductor of sorts with each strum and pluck imitating a cue given by an orchestra conductor that kept the other players on track.
Drummer Jonathan Barber was hardly left out of mixes. In fact, during the course of the evening, it was common to see the Pat Metheny facing him, directly feeding off his energy, the two exchanging bursts of notes with nearly equivalent ingenuity and detail. Abbreviated percussion intervals, including the extended segment at the close of the formal set, contained rapid-fire fusillades around Jonathan Barber’ kit and, as the sole deeply exploratory interval of this near two hours and a half, mirrored the band’s impromptu approach to this concert.
And toward the end of the show proper, the duets between Metheny and each individual served an even more deliberate purpose: not only to allow for individual showcases of the players’ skills but also to offer vivid illustrations of how each simultaneously reflects and expand the leader’s own considerable musicianly virtues.
I also believe that he is possibly the greatest musician ever to grace a guitar, and over 20 Grammy awards and three gold records are more than enough proof. Watching him perform on 5 different custom guitars throughout the evening was an awe-inspiring experience. I have to give respect to Pat Metheny.
Pat Metheny has amassed an amazing 20 grammys over the years, he released his first album in 1976 and has well over forty albums since. It would be hard to dispute his status as a jazz legend.
By Simon Sargsyan
Photos by Tbilisi jazz festival Facebook page
This video is not from the Tbilisi concert hall first concert, because the managers there banned Pat Matheny from shooting, but at the Tbilisi Jazz Festival, at the beginning of the concert, Matheny played this interesting guitar.
