Pat Metheny

This not surprisingly sold-out solo concert was the last in a 40 date European tour and a headlining feature in the 2024 Cambridge Jazz Festival. The novelty and pleasure of playing outside of London or a major city was remarked upon by Pat Metheny early on in this enthralling show, well over two hours straight through, without interval. It was evident that very careful attention had been paid to ensuring optimum diversity of sound and spectacle throughout. The state-of-the-art, 740-seater Saffron Hall, with its highly rated acoustics and intimate design was ideally suited to its purpose here. The tour has been the first of its kind for Metheny, featuring personal and fan favourites going back nearly 50 years and as many recordings.

The show started and ended with solo acoustic guitar, lending a pleasing circularity to the whole, with a succession of surprises and excursions in between. The stage layout hinted at this, with an array of guitars, pedals, electronics and sundry mysterious items under drapes. Every so often the guitar tech would sneak out of the wings with a different or differently tuned guitar (I was surprised, on arrival at the venue, to see a sizeable lorry parked outside the auditoriun. Why would you need such a big lorry for a solo guitar tour, I wondered. Now I know why).

At several points during the evening Metheny spoke at some length about how a particular piece or album or musical collaboration came about and what was learnt as a result – for example his association with vibraphonist Gary Burton around the time of the Passengers album (1977). These autobiographical digressions were quite a revelation –often humorous, always revealing, and making for a nicely balanced whole.

One such digression concerned his long association with renowned Canadian luthier Linda Manzer, who built his nylon strung baritone guitar, very much in evidence tonight, and which offers sonic possibilities Metheny has become increasingly fascinated by. He explained their history together as well as his own modifications. The fact that this has required learning new finger positions for most of his repertoire appears to have daunted him not at all.

The larger part of tonight’s programme, roughly 60%, were Metheny originals from five decades, the remainder judiciously chosen jazz and bossa standards, soundtracks, American and British popular songs. The most resonant and powerful to my mind were the sumptuous, and unadulterated classical and baritone guitar renditions of melodic originals such as “James”, “Sueno con Mexico” and “Last train home” along with Morricone’s “Cinema Paradiso”, Bacharach’s “Alfie” and Lennon/McCartney’s “And I love her” and “Here, there and Everywhere”. The sonic horror show of “Zero Tolerance for Silence Part 10” seemed like an aberration (more than a few people chose this moment to go to the bar) but it did make one appreciate everything else.

Approaching the final stages of the show the drama in terms of both sound and vision reached new heights. First came the arrival of the remarkable 42 string Pikasso guitar, with its otherworldly sound possibilities in different registers, also built by Linda Manzer, in collaboration with PM. According to the guitar technician, this can take 20 minutes just to tune. The ultimate coup de théâtre was the literal unveiling of the mighty and glittering Orchestrion at the back of the stage. This is a huge, programmable musical spaceship consisting of 150 mechanical instruments of different kinds, in perpetual motion. In Metheny’s own words, “it proves once and for all just how weird I actually am”. Back down to earth, the unadulterated acoustic guitar encore of Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” has to be one of the highlights of the evening. Sublime.