What will Pat Metheny bring in April?

Guitarist Pat Metheny plays The Centre downtown on April 27th, presented by Modo-Live and Infidels Jazz. It's one of the highest-profile Vancouver jazz concerts coming up right now, though that status could of course change with new announcements.

Metheny's next album Side-Eye III+ comes out on February 27th; the single "In On It" is available now. This Vancouver date is co-presented by Modo-Live and Infidels Jazz.

"The first time I ever heard Metheny's music was in high school," Infidels Jazz founder Tim Reinert said, "on an album he did with Ornette Coleman called Song X. I've heard Pat live several times since then, but the concert that stuck out the most was when he played the Orpheum in 1999, with Larry Grenadier & Bill Stewart. Fantastic trio. I still can't get over that occasionally I get to be part of shows featuring musicians whose work I grew up with, and I'm so grateful to Modo-Live for presenting this show, and for inviting Infidels to be part of it."

Tickets for the show in April aren't yet in danger of selling out, but they might be before I next get the chance to write to you about Metheny. (I bought mine.) Let's take a look through what he's been up to and what he might play here.

Listening to "In On It", I hear a fast-moving tune with a variety of frantic percussion.

My personal favourite Metheny is Bright Size Life and 80/81 from his youth, plus the later Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories). The quick-changing "In On It" is less like those records and more like the Pat Metheny Group, arguably the guitarist's most famous project. His solo, having that smooth tilt on some of his licks, extends over supporting wordless oohs. Then the ensemble comes to a full stop on a couple of shots, and I wonder how he and the band came up with what happens next.

Side-Eye is a recent project that features younger musicians. Metheny introduced it on a live album called Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV), which had James Francies on keys and Marcus Gilmore on drums. "I like to keep of track of things. I spend a lot of time listening to people and going out and hearing people, and kind of note the people who I think, oh yeah, that guy would be fun to play with. And I then invite 'em up to my house," Metheny said in a promotional video at the time.

For Side-Eye III+, the key members are now Chris Fishman on keyboards and Joe Dyson on drums, from Los Angeles and New Orleans respectively. Metheny compared Dyson favourably to one of the great drummers of his life, Antonio Sánchez, in this recent interview.

Metheny continued in the same interview about Fishman, "He's a drummer who plays keyboards, because he's of this Louis Cole thing. This Louis Cole thing is this weird, hip scene in LA – it's not weird, amazing scene in LA – led by this guy Louis Cole, where pretty much everybody has to be a drummer to hang with him." (Cole comes to Vancouver in David Binney's Action Trio at the Hargrove next Friday, presented by Coastal Jazz; to bury the lede for the couple of you who just read because you know me personally, I recently took on Coastal as a marketing client, and the first show I'm working on is that one.)

"He's got a time thing happening that feels like drums to me," Metheny said about Fishman's keyboard playing.

More musicians joined on for the album, including "bassist Daryl Johns, harpist Brandee Younger, percussionist Luis Conte, and a vocal ensemble led by Mark Kibble of Take 6," according to the press release. Two of those names pop for me personally. One is Younger, whose latest album I liked and wrote to you about.

The other is Johns, who plays bass on the single "In On It" and is very much "of this Louis Cole thing". I came across this video on YouTube way back when I was in first year, first semester at CapU and right away admired the fellow bassist a year younger than me; I couldn't play "Billie's Bounce" like that, but man, now I wanted to try.

Since then, Johns has done what a lot of other jazz-trained musicians our age have done: apply a comprehensive and tech-literate set of production skills to all genres of broadly indie-pop music, becoming an essential collaborator to many while also releasing his own stuff. I noticed him in a Louis Cole-coded documentary that also popped up on my YouTube, 13 years after I first heard of Johns: "Without A Stage: LA's Independent Jazz Scene".

I hope Johns comes here as part of the band in April.

Previously, I've been to one Metheny show: on March 3, 2014 at the Vogue Theatre, he brought his Unity Group of Giulio Carmassi on electronics, trumpet, and percussion, Chris Potter on saxophones, Ben Williams on bass, and Sánchez on drums. They released the album Kin a month prior.

Alex Varty wrote about that show at the time for the Georgia Straight and also wrote there about at least two more Metheny shows. There's the previous time Metheny played The Centre: May 1, 2010 touring his album Orchestrion, which features just him alongside music-playing machinery. Then further back, there's the Pat Metheny Group in 2005 at the Queen E touring The Way Up, the last Group album with core member Lyle Mays on piano and composition.

On October 20, 2018, Metheny returned to the Vogue with a quartet of Gwilym Simcock on piano, Linda May Han Oh on bass, and Sánchez. They went on to record Metheny's final album for Nonesuch Records, From This Place. (Metheny had made all the albums I mentioned with respect to those three Vancouver shows, and several more, for Nonesuch.)

Those probably aren't all the shows he's played here in the last 20 years, but that's what I found as I got caught up with Metheny's work. In the years between that last Vogue visit and now, he also released a chamber music album, Road to the Sun; and two solo albums, Dream Box and MoonDial.

Metheny will play four nights at Seattle's Jazz Alley immediately before coming here, plus a show at Portland's Newmark Theatre the night after to continue the long tour. He'll appreciate that hip LA energy.

Jan. 16: I updated this article to include a comment from Tim Reinert.

Jan. 30: Here's the second single from Side-Eye III+, "Don't Look Down":