Wow. I'd love to hear you play as well as he does. As for one style? Let's look at his discography (just a few of his records):
- Bright Size Life: Trio with Jaco Pastorius & Bob Moses, tunes he wrote are still being performed today - and not just by him, some have entered the pantheon of standards;
- Pat Metheny Group ("the White Album"): introduces a whole new way of blending acoustic and electric instruments that transcends typical "fusion" trappings. considered by many to be a classic
- 80/81: another classic (critical and popular); Midwestern folk blends with free bop and more.
- Travels: One of the most revered live albums of the past 30 years; Midwestern Americana blends with complex cinematic compositional constructs....and to play through them ain't easy at all. Also, along with the previous studio album, Offramp, Metheny begins to broaden his textural palette with guitar synth
- Song X: With Ornette Coleman, Metheny delves into free jazz with one of its progenitors, for an album acclaimed as a classic.
- Still Life (Talking): Pat Metheny Group explores Brazilian music in its own inimitable fashion. Metheny continues to expand his palette with introduction of synclavier.
- Secret Story: an epic solo album of cinematic proportions. Writing for choir, orchestra, small ensembles and more, with Metheny's own palette continuing to broaden
- We Live Here: his "groove and loop" record. It may sound easy and smooth, but dig beneath the surface, and tell me you can navigate some of the complex structures found underneath
- Imaginary Day & The Way Up - Two of his best latter period PMG albums, with more textures, more stylistic stretching ("The Roots of Coincidence" won "best rock instrumental" - form a jazzer?!?!)
- Unity Band and Unity Group's Kin - Unity Group takes Metheny's return to saxophone-based music and more open-ended improvisational constructs of Unity Band, and meshes with PMG's cinematic writing. Add the Orchestrion, which expands his palette even further, and Kin, the new album, is a potential classic in his discography.
- Tap - shows he can take someone else's music (John Zorn in this case) and adapt his musical world view to create something that would not have been possible strictly from his pen, but that Zorn could never have envisaged when he handed the usually skimpy compositions of the Masada songbook to him and said "go!"
Tell me how he is a one-style guy, just with the examples provided. Either you're living on a different planet than I am or you need to use those Q-tips in your ears a lot more regularly
Seriously, I am not suggesting that everyone likes Metheny or
should like Metheny (my wife doesn't, but for reasons that are a whole lot more reasoned than yours, and she still respects him and appreciates why he is one of the most influential guitarists of his generation), or that they should like everything he puts out. But to dismiss, as you have, a musician who has probably covered more musical ground than any other jazz musician of name, changed the world of jazz as he has, and continued to explore new avenues year after year - not always successfully, but that's fine....better to risk and fail than to not risk at all - it says to me that you've either not heard much of his music
or you don't like him, and mistake what you like for what is good and what you don't for what is bad.
Most reasonable folks who realize they are no more than arbiters of their taste, not what is good or bad, respect Metheny, even if he does nothing for them. He's a rarity, and if nothing else, the absolute antithesis of the one-trick pony you accuse him of being.
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