Last month, two iconoclast musicians collaborated on an album for the first time. Pat Metheny’s renditions of John Zorn songs have caught more attention than either individual’s stand-alone projects of late. Recorded mostly as a solo album, Tap: Book of Angels volume 20, allowed Metheny to play all manner of instruments before getting his long-time drummer, Antonio Sanchez, to overdub parts. Presiding over the project as an executive producer, Zorn picked 16 of his songs for Metheny to choose from and put the album out through his Tzadik label in collaboration with Nonesuch Records. Before the New York Times’ Nate Chinen conducted a joint interview with the musicians, Metheny and Zorn had never met, even though they’ve both been heavyweights in the American jazz world for nearly 40 years.
Pat Metheny is kind of the Platonic ideal of the jazz guitarist. Versatile, heavily-schooled, and interested in expanding boundaries, Metheny has been one of the most popular improvising musicians in the world since his first record, Bright Size Life, came out in 1976. Fitting well into traditional jazz, jazz fusion, and smooth jazz radio, Metheny has sold records far beyond the scope of most improvising players, and he routinely fills large music halls and concert theaters.
Roughly the same age and a veteran of the mid-70s New York jazz and improv scene, Zorn has staked out a niche in a collective of avant-garde experimental musicians where his idiosyncratic aesthetic theories and “game play” approach to spontaneous composition have mingled with his abrasive anti-capitalist theories about making art. He owns his own label—which puts out dozens of records a year, mostly of his own compositions—and maintains one of the last bastions of improv music in Manhattan, The Stone, where Zorn picks musical curators to book gigs each month and 20-30 audience members pay $10 a set (regardless of the performers) to sit on folding chairs. Nothing is consumed in The Stone except music, and all the night’s money goes to whoever is performing. If Pat Metheny is the darling of the mainstream jazz press, Zorn is more conspicuous for his invisibility in commercial settings. Zorn’s productivity, however, is legendary, even among folks who don’t like his music.
In the early 1990s, Zorn finalized a musical breakthrough that he’d been working on all his life. To his mind, he seemed to forge a complete rift from the jazz tradition that had introduced him to the alto saxophone and composition. Over the course of a couple of years, Zorn composed 200 songs based in a series of scales and rhythmic inflections from Jewish folk traditions, discovering—and in fact, creating—a new vocabulary for improvising musicians, one no longer rooted in the blues notes and harmonies that have undergirded most American jazz and improv music of the 20th century. That Zorn’s trumpet, sax, bass, and drums quartet, Masada, performed the new batch of compositions very much in the style of 1960s jazz quartets—most apparently, Ornette Coleman’s—seemed less significant to Zorn than the fact that Masada improvised together in a new body of song material. A decade later, Zorn wrote another 300 songs for Masada (according to some accounts, in a single month). Masada was no longer the name of a band, but a body of material that could be played by any imaginable music ensemble. The body of work, The Book of Angels 1 and The Book of Angels 2, became a canon of music that Zorn could get hundreds of musicians to record and perform, effectively reinventing an entire world of improv approaches, forms, and material. Zorn procured and produced a “Masada Rock” album, various versions of Masada string trios, quartets, and chamber ensembles, “Electric Masada,” which hearkened back to Miles Davis’s electric bands of the Bitches Brew era, and many more iterations in-between. Jam band faves Medeski, Martin and Wood plays Masada, as does Kramer (of Shimmy Disc Records and Bongwater fame), Mike Patton (the crazily talented vocalist from Faith No More), and ubiquitous DownBeat Magazine poll-winner, Dave Douglas. Considering Zorn’s dozens of Masada records, and the hundreds of musicians who have performed on them, it doesn’t seem like it should be all that surprising that Pat Metheney might make a Masada record. Only it is.
The Times is having a field day with the story (for a jazz record). In a “Popcast,” Nate Chinen describes eloquently how his first thought upon reading the press release was “Whoa,” and his second thought was “Oh, that makes so much sense.” NPR also did a story on it which, though it didn’t express so much surprise, remains surprising because NPR was talking about John Zorn. The man just doesn’t get much press, and he wants it that way. I was riding in a car when I heard the NPR review and immediately thought, “Whoa.” I texted a musician buddy who said, “Whoa,” and by the time I heard back, I had received a text from a mutual friend of said-buddy, telling me NPR just reported on Metheny’s new Zorn album—noting, “Whoa!” It’s weird. And the fact that it’s weird illustrates the weird boxes music listeners put music in. There’s a good chance most people reading this know neither Pat Metheny nor John Zorn, or have much interest in contemporary jazz or jazz-inspired records. Yet, here it is. Two guys mostly steeped in the same tradition, both spending their careers broadening horizons and expanding the forms they have dedicated their lives to mastering, work together for the first time, and it cause ripples. Minor ripples by internet standards to be sure, but sonic and imaginative ripples nonetheless. And the results are quite spectacular.
Personally, I’m not much of a fan of Pat Metheny’s guitar playing, but I recognize his brilliance and his virtuosity. At the same time, I truly love many of Zorn’s records and have played more than a handful of his tunes regularly over the past 20 years. Both musicians have my utmost respect, even as I gravitate toward one over the other.
So hearing Metheny play Zorn is just a gift. Six songs long, about 50 minutes of music, Metheny plays everything: guitars, pianos, bass, tiples, bells, bandoeneon, percussion, flugelhorn, and his own invention, the orchestrion. But the instruments of choice are guitars and various synth-guitars. He approaches Zorn’s melodies and intonations as a fresh opportunity, one that allows him to cultivate any mood he wants, while retaining the quality the tunes demands. The songs are mostly dense and layered, revealing Metheny-esque counter-points, re-harmonizations, and re-textualizations remarkably rich for a primarily solo effort. (Antonio Sanchez’s drumming—sometimes huge and powerful, often tasteful and restrained—plays a big role in realizing this record.) In Zorn and Metheny’s joint interview with Chinen, Metheny explains how, though he spent a lot of time arranging and over-dubbing parts for his songs, all the improvisations were first takes—not “one take” (without any “fixes” or re-dos), but First Takes: Metheny’s first time improvising over a section of a song after he’d spent hours, days, or weeks constructing the background sections. In the age of recording, this is ridiculous—even Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page recorded multiple versions of their guitar solos on their 8- and 16-track rock tunes in the 60s. Metheny limited himself and embraced the self-imposed limits. Like Zorn’s self-limitations as a composer and improviser, Metheny got into the spirit and produced a record at once highly “produced” for an improv record and 100% in the spirit of jazz and the great tradition of American improvised music. Even Zorn is impressed.