Where the chords have no names The Pat Metheny Group takes the long view BY JON GARELICK

I’ve never been a fan of the Pat Metheny Group. Pat Metheny the jazz guitarist, yes. His startling debut trio record at the age of 21, Bright Size Life (ECM, 1975), yes. His live album 80/81 (ECM, 1981) with Michael Brecker, Dewey Redman, and Charlie Haden, yes. Song X (Geffen, 1985) with Ornette Coleman, muy yes! His dirty solo grunge guitar experiment Zero Tolerance for Silence (Geffen, 1992), yes again. And any number of guitar-trio records, collaborations with Haden, Joshua Redman, Jim Hall, and so on — all yes. But the Group — the PMG — has had an inclination to amplify what I like least about Metheny: his octave-layered sweet tones and synthed-up harmonies, his sometimes toothache-sweet melodies. Even his more Brazilian and "world"-flavored pieces, though admirable in many ways, have pretty much left me cold.

Maybe that’s because as he was coming on with the Group (which released its debut recording on ECM in 1978), I was pushing into the late-’70s/early-’80s avant-garde of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill’s Air, Steve Lacy, and, here in Boston, the Fringe. I wanted only Metheny’s Ornette-ish side. The PMG was over there, busting up the charts, filling stadiums, but never drawing me in.

Which is why I’m so surprised to have fallen in love with the PMG’s latest, The Way Up (Nonesuch). I can’t say that all that much has changed, unless it’s me. Metheny still writes all the music with PMG co-founder and keyboardist Lyle Mays. There’s still an essential sweetness to its music, an ingratiating poppiness. But there’s something else too.

The Way Up emerges from traffic noise, with the sound of toy instruments beating out a tricky odd meter. Drummer Antonio Sanchez picks up the beat; that’s followed by a repeated arpeggiated cascade in piano, what sounds like sitar, and various acoustic guitars, and then there’s a digitalized whoosh! transition in the mix, followed by a variation on the arpeggiated figure from the piano, gradual modulation up, and eventually the first solo electric-guitar line over that percolating beat. There’s an answering unison variation from harmonica (Gregoire Maret) and trumpet (Cuong Vu), then a more soaring sustained guitar figure, a return of the arpeggiated figures, a big fuzz-bass cadence, and then a wonderful huffing harmonium sound with a touch of one of Maret’s pure, vibratoless high notes. There are pauses, breaks for short bits of melody, and always that insistent beat before the segment returns to placid acoustic-guitar figurations.

So there are the same surface textures of sweetness and light, but there’s also a lot of detail in the midst of all that transparency. The piece moves into its second section without pause, and here Metheny makes his first beautiful ascending melodic statement. It’s the only portion of the piece that repeats, says Metheny, and it’s a beauty.

Perhaps it’s that lack of repetition that keeps this piece continually fresh over the course of its 68 minutes and 10 seconds. Using shifting rhythms, the tension and release of complex harmonies, and a subtle attention to dynamics, Mays and Metheny create long, satisfying arcs of narrative development. And whenever the music threatens to become too sugary, they cut the music off at the knees with another digital whoosh and shift to another rhythm, another soloist, a passage of straight-ahead up-tempo jazz swing, some vigorous bowed cello from bassist Steve Rodby. Chalk it up to the power of the title’s suggestion, or the upward striving of that signature melody in Part Two, or even the vertical design of the CD booklet, with its variation on the urban lamp post, but the feeling of The Way Up is one of continual ascendancy. And it’s enhanced by an undercurrent of sadness: in the childlike arias from Maret’s harmonica, in the album’s quiet, fade-out resolution. The urban theme (again, echoed in the cover art, with its street scenes and taxi cabs) also makes this very much a post–September 11 jazz album.

The long form has been a bugaboo of jazz — improvised music works best in repeated short forms. There’s always the argument made about long forms that they’re not really long — just collections of short forms. But Metheny and Mays have created a true long form — even with its pauses and stops, it’s a continually evolving, unfolding piece. Critic Whitney Balliett called Ellington’s short pieces "mini-concertos" (and so did Ellington, in "Concerto for Cootie"). These three and four-minute pieces were not "songs" (whatever their melodic content) but short, multi-section pieces for orchestra. The same is true of The Way Up, but there’s nothing "mini" about it.

"We’ve always had tunes that were 10, 12, 15 minutes long," Metheny tells me over the phone from the road in St. Louis, "and even a couple of records that were kind of hinting at a continuous kind of feeling, like As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls." He names a couple of others — Secret Story (Geffen, 1992), Imaginary Day (Warner Bros. 1997). "But at best you could say those were suites, groups of disparate material that was linked under a single umbrella. This is fundamentally different in the sense that the piece itself is conceived and written as a piece that would address all of the possibilities of development that come with extended composition, and in fact, that’s sort of the fun of it from the writing side — putting together the puzzle that ultimately makes up what the form of the piece is."

And what determined the length? "The length itself was determined by the material form, which is the length of a CD. . . . You know, this looming 76-minute boundary thing has been one that all of us that make CDs have had to deal with in one way or another. I mean, you either fill up the CD or you don’t. So that’s what we were shooting for: let’s write a piece that takes up the CD and make that the CD."

Metheny also sees the length as integral to a larger cultural statement the band wanted to make. On the one hand, he says that he and Mays have had to get used to the idea that, as the years go by, the PMG has become "kind of an island that is not connected to any continent in terms of style." But he says there’s another "larger cultural level of just how far removed we feel from a world where there’s now a chart in Billboard for ringtones, and how that just doesn’t line up with the reality that we have found in our own lives as musicians — that the kinds of things that have real value take a long time. It takes a lifetime to be able to address these kinds of issues compositionally or to be a good improviser or write a book. The kinds of values that I think we honor in everything that we try to do are not the kinds of values that would be found in a world where there’s a chart for ringtones. It’s kind of a protest to that culture. Maybe by going deeply into those kinds of issues of development, nuance, detail, and all those things that I hope are representative of music itself and hopefully in the other things that we’ve done, we can illuminate sort of a way up rather than, you know, in the infamous words of Trent [Reznor], ‘The Downward Spiral.’ "

When I suggest The Way Up as a post–September 11 disc, Metheny, who says he’s "appalled" by the "whole conservative movement in the world culturally and certainly politically," says, "I think it’s there. One of our jobs as musicians is to report on the times that we live in, and I feel that jazz in particular is very, very well suited to do that. You know, it’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me that there are very few modern jazz guys that really kind of go full at the issues of the times and use the modern tools of our time to express some kind of poetic look at that time. To me, that’s part of what jazz is — the way that jazz guys have been able to filter the culture and the sounds of their time through the prism that the sophistication of jazz offers." Metheny says some of it’s a matter of using modern technology, Digital Performer, ProTools — "these are technological things that color the output somehow. And one mission of the band from the beginning has been to address the tools of our time, to try to reconcile these things with the quote-unquote tradition."

Then there’s the album’s advanced harmonic language (another vertical form!), which Metheny sees as very much part of the time. "You know, we got into lots of areas where there are no longer definable chords. We do our best to define them, but trying just to come up with names for these chords was almost funny. It’s not your usual major, minor, diminished, augmented chord. They go beyond that. That to me has been kind of in the works for the last 40 to 50 years with people like Wayne Shorter. To me, this kind of application of that harmonic stuff is something particular to this time."

Performing such a complexly written, long piece in concert has been a challenge. "It’s kind of like learning ‘Giant Steps’ or something like that, but times 20 just in terms of the amount of stuff that you have to remember harmonically. We all had to practice for several months individually before we all got together." And Metheny does insist that the band memorize the piece. "As an improvising musician, you can certainly have a chart up there for chord symbols, but it’s not the same somehow. Even on a tactile level, it’s sort of like you see ‘G-minor 7, flat 5’ and you go, ‘Okay, that’s a Locrean scale.’ Because the thing is, when you’re improvising on something that’s complicated, you have to not memorize the chord, you have to memorize the map. It’s sort of like, you have to know the whole map of an area because you want to be able to improvise your route each time. So you have to know, ‘Oh, I can’t go there because there’s a tree there, and I can’t go there because there’s a house there.’ You have to know the whole map. If you don’t know the whole map, then you’re just kinda gonna stay on the streets, which is what the chord symbols would be. And you don’t want to do that; you want to be able to go off-road."

Besdies, says Metheny, "I don’t like having music on the bandstand. I think that for the amount of bread that people are paying for tickets and for the amount of gigs we’re gonna do, we should be able to present this music just as what it is without having to have charts."

The Pat Metheny Group plays the Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Place in Boston, this Saturday, March 26; call (617) 931-2000.