When Pat Metheny began learning the guitar at age 12, he was just like thousands of other young musicians of the 1960s: sitting in his living room in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, strumming Beatles songs and struggling with the F chord. Now, at age 70, he has somewhat diverged from the majority: he has won 20 Grammys, released more than 50 albums and is known as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
Last night at the Barbican, in the second of two sold-out solo concerts at the London Jazz Festival, he was entrancing. Metheny cuts an unassuming figure: he emerged looking like a roadie in a black jumper with the sleeves rolled up, faded black jeans and black trainers (topped off, of course, with his signature shoulder-length shaggy haircut). But when he picked up his guitar – first a nylon-string acoustic – he transformed into the musical wizard everyone was here to see.
That said, if you didn’t know anything about him, you may have found the first 20 minutes confounding. Rather than playing specific songs from his 50-year oeuvre, he played what seemed like a stream of consciousness, incorporating snippets from crowd favourites (like 1993’s “Have You Heard”) but through flow-state noodling. He pinged harmonics and made the guitar sing, before moving on to acoustic renditions of songs from Under the Missouri Sky, his 1997 album with the legendary bassist Charlie Haden.
Later, though, as Metheny progressed onto different guitars (in between addressing the audience on the mic, speaking more than he ever has at a concert in the UK, about his creative journey), a picture began to form of the multicoloured genius that makes him the artist he is. After 45 minutes of playing quiet, dreamy melodies, he became more experimental: a track on an electro-acoustic bass guitar, he used the plectrum over the fretboard to create thunder and crashes, recording on a loop pedal as he went to create a wall of furious sound; 15 minutes with the famous 42-string “Pikasso” guitar – thus named due to its distorted appearance with three extra fretboards – that he had specially made.
Then an extended spoken intro to the baritone guitar led to the beautiful, meditative work from his new album, Moondial, written solely for that instrument – and eventually he picked up his signature hollow-bodied electric, playing soaring melodies over chords he’d looped on the acoustic. It was that classic Pat Metheny sound, and it was ecstatic – but that intimate feel that had been there from the outset remained, as though we were watching him play freely in his bedroom.
After a standing ovation, Metheny came out for an encore – a curtain was pulled back to reveal his “mechanical orchestra”, a huge contraption of percussion instruments programmed to play themselves in a jangling, tapping cacophony. Having been seated for most of the concert, he walked around the stage playing different guitars, looping sections, and eventually bringing out his synth guitar.
This was so thrilling that Metheny was called back to the stage four more times. For his fifth and final encore, he played his version of a Beatles song, “And I Love Her”, on an acoustic guitar – a fitting end to a concert about a lifelong love affair between a boy from Missouri and his magical new instrument.
