Images of Metheny by Jason Vieaux (review)

Guitarist Pat Metheny has thrilled adoring fans and inspired aspiring guitarists for over thirty years now. His graceful, arcing melodies, floating over dense harmonic pads from synthesized keyboards, or just open guitar strings, carry listeners along. His fleet improvisations draw gasps of disbelief from budding players, as he cites guitarists as disparate as Charlie Christian, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Hall, and George Harrison while drawing on the musical vocabulary of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Charlie Parker. At the same time, Metheny has drawn the ire of critics who have found his compositions smacking of New Age pap, his experiments with gadgetry self-indulgent, and his wide-ranging musical interests frustrating or obtuse. One gets the impression that Metheny himself remains comfortably above the fray, following his muse of the moment as it leads him to explore the intimate solo guitar, the forty-two-string Pikasso Guitar or his new digital/mechanical “Orchestrion.” Never mind the setting, Metheny remains his own man and his music remains wonderfully or frustratingly his own, replete with heart-on-sleeve melodic formulas, moments of flying virtuosity (composed and improvised), thick neo-Romantic harmonies, sparse single-line guitar licks, straight-ahead drive, and rhapsodic wandering.

Metheny, a native of the US Midwest but a product of the country’s wildly disparate musical culture, thrills and frustrates in part because he straddles so many stylistic fences. He plays jazz with rock inflections long after fusion was fashionable. He blends blues phrasing with surges of synthesized Romantic strings. His titles take note of his Missouri roots but his heartbeat seems to emanate from Rio. A sophisticated and virtuosic musician, Metheny seems addicted to the overproduced sweetness of pop music. He returns to the roots of the acoustic guitar but cannot seem to leave well enough alone, and constantly tinkers with its sound or construction.

The arrangements and performance featured on classical guitarist Jason Vieaux’s 2005 solo recording, Images of Metheny, confirms the fact that Metheny writes wonderful and evocative melodies which fit—or, more precisely belong on—the guitar. The liner notes accompanying the recording consist principally of a conversation between the performer and new music maven John Schaefer. Early in the interview, in response to Schaefer’s questions, Vieaux confirms two important points about this recording. First, although the recording features arrangements of works by a jazz musician, it is clearly not a jazz recording. Second, the focus of this recording is melody, the real mainstay of Pat Metheny’s success as a composer.

Vieaux draws principally on Metheny tunes from the 1990s, arranging pieces from the popular Secret Story (1992) as well as Still Life (1987) and Beyond the Missouri Sky (1997), among others. Metheny’s tunes—especially his earlier works—unwind in a fairly consistent pattern—a loose, rhapsodic opening leads to a denser or more rhythmically driven midsection, which gives way to a recapitulation of the opening material. Of course, such predictability (or dependability) may well be at the root of both Metheny’s popularity with his diehard fans and the distaste some critics express for the same music. In performance, Metheny might break up this predictability through improvisation or varying textures but his recordings sometimes suffer from an element of sameness. Vieaux’s effort, especially since he has neither improvisation nor a band to fall back on, suffers this same fate but it can hardly be called his fault. His arrangements are meticulous and his playing lovely. Vieaux ranks as one of this country’s finest classical guitarists and his impeccable technique and penetrating musicality serve him well in this project.

While classical players have arranged and interpreted popular music for generations, the recent penchant for setting pop tunes might be traced to Christopher O’Riley’s successful 2003 CD True Love Waits, arrangements for solo piano of Radiohead songs. When compared to O’Riley’s efforts, Vieaux’s work with Metheny’s music seems more a logical extension of Metheny’s oeuvre than a reinterpretation, due in no small part to the fact that this music was...