50 Years into His Career, Pat Metheny Explores a New Landscape of Sound on the Baritone Guitar

Photo: James KatzLast fall Pat Metheny kicked off a tour unlike any he’d done before, surveying the sounds and approaches of his diverse solo projects going back to the 1970s. I caught the tour opener in Homer, New York, and while Metheny was alone onstage, the show was anything but small. Over the course of the evening, he performed with a dozen guitars—acoustic, electric, nylon-string, steel-string, archtop, even the 42-string Pikasso guitar—building from intricate fingerstyle solos to live looping with additional guitars mounted on stands to the crescendo of the Orchestrion: his mad-science mechanical band, including an acoustic drum kit, controlled by his guitar.

As it happened, on that night Metheny debuted a special guitar: a Manzer nylon-string baritone that he’d just decided to try with the third and fourth strings tuned up an octave—a setup he’d used in the past on a steel-string baritone. Metheny became entranced with the possibilities and challenges of the nylon baritone in this tuning, and as the tour continued he immersed himself in it, onstage and off. And just a few months later he decided to capture his discoveries in the studio, resulting in the new album MoonDial—a gorgeous, meditative journey on the solo baritone, from original pieces to reimagined settings of Chick Corea’s “You’re Everything,” the Beatles’ “Here, There, and Everywhere,” and the traditional “Londonderry Air.”

The fact that Metheny keeps breaking ground in this way, 50 years into his career as one of the leading jazz guitarists of our time, will come as no surprise to anyone who’s followed the trail of this restlessly inventive artist. Though he often plays electric guitar, Metheny’s acoustic-oriented projects have been impactful, spanning the folk fusion of New Chautauqua (1979), duets with bassist Charlie Haden on Beyond the Missouri Sky (1997), and the solo steel-string baritone excursions of One Quiet Night (2003) and What It’s All About (2011). 

In Metheny’s acoustic work since the ’80s, Canadian luthier Linda Manzer has been a vital partner, creating dozens of custom instruments to fulfill his wide-ranging and sometimes fanciful requests (see “Building the Dream” sidebar below). What’s remarkable is that no matter what type of guitar is in Metheny’s hands, or what style of music he’s playing, his voice and touch are always instantly identifiable.

In the summer I caught up with Metheny over Zoom, and then by email, where he shared these thoughts on his latest solo ventures—and why every one of his 50-plus releases feels like a single album.

What led you to explore the nylon-string baritone guitar?

The journey into the world of baritone for me began with the memory of a tuning that a guy in my little town in Missouri had shown me. He told me he was building a double-neck guitar for himself, a regular guitar and a baritone guitar, and he mentioned as I was leaving his garage where he was working on this instrument, “The only way a baritone guitar works is if you tune the middle two strings up an octave.” At the time he told me that, I really had no idea what he was talking about. 

Many years later, Linda [Manzer] had a client she had made several guitars for, Craig Snyder. She made her first baritone guitar for Craig, and Craig had it in a studio where we happened to both be working. I’d never seen anything like that. I played it, and I was like, “Oh, man, I’ve got to ask Linda if she would make one of these for me,” which she did. And then, honestly, like everybody with a baritone guitar, you don’t quite know what to do with it, because it doesn’t really fit in a lot of situations, not to mention that a lot of the normal voicings in a conventional baritone tuning are almost too low. 

But I then remembered what I had heard [about the octave tuning] when I was 12 or whatever and thought, Oh, I’m going to try that. So I tuned the middle two strings up an octave—you know, found the correct strings and so forth—and really not knowing what I was doing, I made that record One Quiet Night. Most of it was improvised on a single night. 

Didn’t you use Nashville high-string tuning [with the bottom four strings all up an octave] going way back to New Chautauqua or perhaps earlier?

Yes, even back to the Gary Burton days [in the mid ’70s, when Metheny played in the vibraphonist’s band]. I had written the tune “Phase Dance” using the Nashville tuning, first for a gig with my brother Mike, then we started playing it in Gary’s band for a few months before I left to start my own band. My big invention around then was to go to a hardware store and build a clamp that I could put on a cymbal stand so I could walk up behind the Guild guitar I was using for that tuning with the [Gibson ES-] 175 over my back, and switch. Now everyone does that, but back then it was pretty rad. I hadn’t seen that before.

What was it like to adapt to a tuning with two strings up an octave?

If you’ve experimented with that kind of tuning at all, you find yourself doing things that are impossible to do any other way in terms of voicings. It has very little to do with the conventional guitar in a lot of ways. The way I describe it is that in this tuning, you basically have three two-stringed instruments. You’ve got a kind of viola, a violin in the middle, and a cello on the bottom. And you have to keep all your voice leading straight between those three sections. 

So the thing of playing grips or finger patterns really doesn’t work. You have to think in this part kind of a way, and it took me years, actually, to get to the point where I could do that. It’s almost like writing for an orchestra. 

Photo: James KatzHow does the nylon-string baritone compare with the steel-string?

One thing about the nylon baritone in that tuning versus the steel, is the steel is really unforgiving. If you make the tiniest little error of any kind, it’s really noticeable. The nylon-string baritone is incredibly forgiving, as nylon-strings tend to be, which makes it just a lot more fun for me, and also it allows me to play stuff that I just would never think about playing with the steel-string in that tuning. And the result is what you’ve heard on the record. It is a lot of mellower stuff, as both instruments suggest—it’s not like you’re going to be playing “Cherokee” at 360 on a baritone. It’s a different thing, but there’s a kind of mobility with the nylon-string that I really could not do on a steel-string. 

With your octave tuning, the third string is the highest pitched, and the fourth string is just one step below the first string. Does that open up new possibilities for cluster harmonies, because the top four strings are tuned so close together?

Yeah, the appeal for me is the harmonic thing: you can literally get four notes that on a piano would be four half steps, and you just can’t do that on a regular guitar. It’s physically impossible. Then you have these bass notes that can take that cluster, as the term you used, and make it mean five different things by changing the bass note below it, so suddenly it’s an exponentially vaster palette of harmony. 

The melodic aspect of it is actually kind of strange, to tell you the truth, because it’s like you have a string quartet that you’re writing for, and the viola player always has the melody. If I start thinking about clefs, which I do, and what it would look like on a piece of staff paper, what I’m doing is strange—not just guitar wise, but in terms of the way it would relate to a piano. Piano players come up to me like, “What are you doing?” 

I write almost everything on piano, and sometimes I try to play on the piano what I’m doing on the baritone guitar—and it’s like your thumb on your right hand is playing all this melody stuff. It’s completely weird on a musical level, but it sounds great. It does require a lot of balancing. I have to really maintain a kind of phrase awareness of how to keep a [melody] pitch stronger sounding when it’s lower than its accompaniment. It’s a challenge. I really do see it as a completely different instrument. When I pick it up, I’m like, this is no longer a guitar. 

Also, with that tuning you’ve got a huge gap between the bass and treble strings: there’s over an octave between your open fifth string and your next highest open string, right? 

Yes, you’re exactly right. You really have to think about the bass note and the melody, and then you’ve got these other three strings or sometimes just two strings that you can use for harmony. 

There’s another weird thing, which is there are a few notes that just don’t exist—I mean they do exist, but they’re way up on the fifth string, above the 12th fret, and they don’t sound believable, in a way, as part of the alto range. For instance, if I want to get to a note a half step lower than the second string, the only place that exists is on the 13th fret of the fifth string. It doesn’t exist anywhere else on the instrument. So that note is really not usable. I have to keep that in mind. 

You mentioned that you compose on piano. What does piano offer that is different than working with a guitar?

Piano is a hundred times easier than guitar. If you play a reasonable voicing on a good piano that has just been tuned by a good tuner, people will think you are a genius. Nope, it is the piano—an incredible instrument. It might take 20 years to get that same musical effect and touch on a guitar.

Is notating ideas always part of your composing process?

Yes, I write everything out as I go. Basically I have an idea that I get on paper, then tag-team it around piano, some kind of keyboard/computer, and if it comes up, a guitar. But what is on the page is the main thing for me.

Listening to MoonDial is like entering into a world. It reminds me of a quote from John Gardner about fiction writing, where he said you’re creating a “vivid and continuous dream.” The album feels very much like that. Do you think of it in that way?

Yeah, and I’m going to go even further: from the first note of [Metheny’s 1975 debut] Bright Size Life till now, it’s all one album for me. You know, there are many musicians who go through their life shedding skin like a snake, but it’s not that for me. To me, the fundamental arguments of where I started are still pretty valid. It’s like I had this house and I’ve been adding on parts over the years: here’s another wing, here’s another sub-basement, and now I’m going to go up another floor. But it’s all still around that basic [structure]. 

The main gig for me has been as a bandleader who writes the music, and the models for me in that department were like [Thelonious] Monk or Keith Jarrett. But [playing solo] is still band leading—it’s just that I’m the band. I still yell at myself the same way I would yell at the band: it should be louder here, it should be softer. I’m always thinking in those same terms. 

But specific to your question, there are some records that are very deep dives into a particular subject. Also, some are documentary records, and others are like Steven Spielberg or widescreen IMAX movie records—like Secret Story. [MoonDial] is obviously in the documentary department: it’s that one guitar from beginning to end played pretty much the same kind of way, with the one exception being one strummy tune. 

I caught your first show in this new type of solo tour for you. What have you discovered in these shows about what you can accomplish by yourself? 

Honestly the night you were there, I was terrified, man. But about ten gigs after the one you saw, I suddenly got it, and now it has become one of my favorite things to do. 

As you know, having seen the presentation, I am using these shows as a way to look at all of the different kinds of solo things I have done over the years. It’s been a lot of fun and an incredible character-building experience, I have to say, for me to just sit up there by myself for two, two and a half hours a night, for that many concerts. I hope you can see another presentation one of these days, because I’ve really improved, I think.

When you’re performing solo, how much improvising do you do? Are the pieces fairly set or more open?

With only a few exceptions—like occasional film scores, the recent through-composed pieces like Road to the Sun or Four Paths of Light—everything I do is focused around improvisation, even if there are lots of written or arranged aspects to what is on either side of that improvising. That said, my sense of what it is to be an improviser contains aspects of playing that go beyond the mythology that seems to surround the word. But suffice it to say that I couldn’t play anything twice the same way, even if I wanted to.

When you’re arranging a song for solo guitar, is there a balance you try to main-tain between creating a fresh setting—reharmonizing, changing the rhythm, etc.—and honoring the original?

As mentioned, for me everything starts and ends with improvising. Composition and its closely related sibling, arranging, are skills that to me are related to improvising but occur at a much cooler temperature. But I feel lucky to be able to have opportunities at the highest temperatures—playing gigs in front of an audience—and the super cool ones, where you might stay in a room for a week deciding whether to end on a Bb or an A.

You’ve said in the past that playing solo can feel very exposed or intimate. Do you still feel that way? 

There’s a wide range. I mean, Zero Tolerance for Silence is not exactly an intimate record in some ways, or Orchestrion. Even New Chautauqua at the time was a very different kind of thing, with all the strumming. There hadn’t really been a record like that before. 

One goal for me, even now, is to make each record different. You know, I’m going to be 70 this year, and people talk about retrospectives and all that. Man, I have zero interest in retrospective anything. I wouldn’t do a tour like the one I’m doing unless I felt like there’s stuff that is still active. 

I love the thing you said about the dream, the ongoing-ness of it all. That’s a very essential part of what it all is for me: this continuation and building on top of other things to get to the next thing. That’s what I’m always working to do.

Creating MoonDialPat Metheny recorded MoonDial on his Manzer nylon-string baritone “in a very small room up in the Hudson Valley in the middle of the winter,” he says. “I primarily used an AEA R88 stereo mic and the excellent Go Acoustic pickup made by Paul McGill in Nashville. I also have a Countryman mic inside the guitar that I use for live performances, but it didn’t play a big part.”

For his unusual baritone tuning, with the third and fourth strings up an octave, he uses strings from the Argentinean company Magma that “allow higher and lower pitches at a somewhat normal tension,” Metheny says. He typically tunes the baritone from A to A, but on MoonDial, he raised or lowered the same relative tuning in order to vary the keys.  

—JPR

Building the DreamLinda Manzer in her shop with the beginnings of a backup nylon-string baritone for Metheny. Photo: Rich ScholesPat Metheny’s nylon-string baritone is the latest fruit of a collaboration with Canadian luthier Linda Manzer that began over 40 years ago. She first encountered Metheny in 1979, when he was playing with Joni Mitchell on the Shadows and Light tour. “He stepped out and played a two- or three-minute solo on ‘Hejira,’” she recalls. “He became my favorite guitar player, and I followed everything he did.” 

In 1982, when Metheny performed with his own band in Toronto, Manzer sent a note backstage and was surprised to receive an invitation to bring her instruments to the hotel after the show. “By the end of the evening, he had ordered a guitar,” she says. “That was a life-changing moment for me.”

Over the years since, Metheny has commissioned Manzer to build about 25 instruments of all types—flattops, classicals, archtops, fretless guitars, sitar guitars, seven-strings, 12-strings . . . and the famous 42-string Pikasso. “Every one of them is different,” she says. “There was a lot of innovation in each one, because he would pose a question to me: ‘Can you make a guitar that sounds like Charlie Haden’s bass?’ or ‘Can you make a guitar that buzzes like a sitar? ‘Can you make something really tiny?’ ‘Can you make something really big?’”

Manzer’s collaboration with Metheny grew out these types of conversations. “We like each other, and we communicate well,” she says. “I guess I was the right person at the right time in his career, because he was looking for somebody to build the guitars that he was coming up with, and I was completely happy to experiment. Anything I delivered to him, even if I hadn’t nailed it, he would embrace and find some way to work with it.’’ 

She adds, “Talk about a dream come true for a guitar builder, to be able to build guitars for somebody like him, with that endless curiosity and fearlessness that inspires you to do your best work. And then the cherry on top of the cake is he performs onstage with the guitars and creates this incredible music.” —JPR