Pat Metheny on Jazz

“What a pleasure it is for me to be invited to talk to you all today. I feel so proud to be a part of the Jazz community. The life that I have been able to lead as player and composer and improviser over these years has been fantastic beyond anything I ever could have imagined when I first started playing”
“In a lot of ways, my own career has roughly paralleled the evolution of the IAJE itself. I started playing music professionally in 1968 when I was about 14, growing up around the Kansas City area — and the IAJE, of course, was founded just next door over in Manhattan, Kansas at right around that same time. And it is really just unbelievable to see a few decades down the road how it has evolved into this huge worldwide organization that has done so much to further the music and, maybe just as important, as we see here today, to foster a sense of community for all of us who are involved in the evolution and study of this wonderful way of playing and thinking.”
“There is no question that Jazz education is in better shape now than ever. 30 years ago, in the small town that I grew up in out there, although we had an excellent music program developed by one of the best band directors in the state, there was no Jazz band, no Jazz program at all; there weren’t even any saxophones in the marching band!”
“The fact that I can go back to Lee’s Summit now, and see that they have several ensembles available to kids that are interested, is just one of countless examples that can be found all over the world of the power and pervasive influence of this movement.”
“Nevertheless, as we stand here at the beginning of this new century as Jazz musicians, we find ourselves living in a culture that often seems to be oblivious, if not outright hostile to musical creativity as most of us in this room would define it. As millennium era musicians and educators, we find ourselves with some major challenges ahead of us, as a community, and as individuals.”
“But in spite of these challenges — in fact, I personally believe it may wind up being BECAUSE of some of these very challenges, and the real pressures that they will put on us to redefine ourselves, for even our very survival — Jazz will likely continue to thrive, although possibly in unexpected ways”
“It is Jazz’s very nature to change, to develop and adapt to the circumstances of its environment. The evidence of this lies in the incredible diversity of music and musicians that have evolved, and lived and flourished, under the wide umbrella of the word “Jazz” itself from the very beginning.”
“Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history — a concept bigger than any single one of its partisans could ever hope to define.”
“However, as a participant in the cause, retaining one’s optimism can be a difficult task in a culture that often appears to be indifferent to the kind of personal creativity that is embodied in the quest for excellence in Jazz. As I talk to other musicians and other members of the larger community, it seems like I keep hearing these somewhat gloomy forecasts for the music’s future, as the sand beneath our feet continues to shift in these changing times — particularly in the last couple of years.”
“But I feel that the apparent limitations of opportunity are actually deceptive. Even though I do see certain disturbing changes taking place among the traditional outlets for playing, for touring, funding for school music programs, possible cuts in funding for the NEA, PBS, etc., I actually also sense that an even more amazing set of potentials is just ahead of us on the not too distant horizon.”
“We are on the verge of entering a world where the potential for communication itself is about to explode beyond almost anything we can even imagine, and Jazz is about nothing if not the essence of communication. On a very basic level that is sometimes easy to forget or overlook, Jazz is actually well suited to excel in this new climate in many ways.”
“And as long as we, the purveyors of the form, are not discouraged by the short term growing pains that appear to be inevitable in changing times like these — and most important, as long as we keep our eyes on, and faith in, the long term power and influence that is embodied in the very nature of the music itself and the way that it is made — we have the opportunity to remain engaged in the collective research that is the lifeblood and unitingelement of our community: basically, the pursuit of trying to play some great music, and to uplift and inform the spirits of the folks who would come to hear it.”
“To accomplish this, we have to stay vigilant in our efforts to address that most difficult task that faces each and every generation of Jazz musicians, regardless of their era or stylistic bent: the task of coming up with musical goods that are challenging and uncompromising, yet fully and utterly compelling to our audiences, and even in this era of increasingly short attention spans, to CAUSE listeners to seek out the musical universe that we are hoping to hip them to.”
“And as long as we can come up with the music, music that delivers on our promise of giving them something that they can’t find anywhere else something that enriches them the same way WE have all been enriched by the musicians that have influenced and inspired all of US to become players and teachers and students and fans, then we have an excellent chance of not only surviving, but taking the music to the people in a way that has historically been elusive.”
“In fact, I believe there is lots of evidence that this IS happening. To me, Jazz has been expanding and growing and broadening, stylistically and in terms of the materials that it draws from as its sources, steadily since its inception. The globalization of the music is now fully underway and there are endless musical opportunities for musicians in pretty much every corner of the globe to learn and address their own musical issues through the prism of the Jazz language.”
“One of the great beauties in the invention of this form, of this platform, of this process, is Jazz’s almost unlimited capacity to allow human beings to find out things about themselves and the culture that they live in through the process of reconciling their own personal experiences with the experiences of others through the blessing of improvisational and organizational inspiration in sound.”
“In recent years, with the centennial of this music approaching and the beginning of a new century, we have spent a lot of time basking in the glory of the achievements of the masters in this form. Tribute records, films, reissues, reissues of reissues, more tribute records, tribute records in tribute to other tribute records … you name it! There are great things about that too, even a certain comfort in that kind of activity, a sense of feeling more connected to the past, a sense of genuine appreciation on all of our parts of amazing accomplishments, and hopefully an always renewed awareness of the incredibly high standards that have been set throughout Jazz’s history. But I feel that to spend too much time doing that can also breed a certain kind of complacency towards one of the major elements that has historically been a primary ingredient in the success, and survival, of this music.”
“There is an important and consistent element in the Jazz tradition of young people coming along and molding — reinventing — the nature of the form itself to fit their times and their circumstances, as only they could possibly know how to do. Whether it was the invention and evolution of the drum set, or the impulse to expand the forms and cadences of the popular songs of the day to accommodate new ways of playing, or the desire to incorporate the newest folk instruments of the time (like the electric guitar), or possibly even nowadays the wild new sounds that permeate an entire culture, there has often been a group of young musicians somewhere saying “what if” to the status quo of Jazz culture — sometimes even saying stronger two word phrases than that — but always in the name, and the natural spirit, of moving the music to a new place.”
“Myself, I have always, and somewhat actively, resisted the mythology that says that we all need to “return” to some kind of a safe place where the proverbial “tradition” resides, in order for Jazz to be considered “REAL” Jazz.”
“As much as I encourage and value the need to understand the roots of this music, in the most specific and detailed ways possible, I also feel that it is worth noting that most attempts to recreate the past in Jazz, even by musicians attempting to recreate their OWN pasts, while often enjoyable, have rarely been made of the fabric of that elusive material that seems to be present whenever and wherever there are musicians who are pushing, and remaking in the likeness of their OWN generation, the boundaries of the music.”
“In this sense, I believe the form is actually somewhat unforgiving. It seems to DEMAND, in fact, that each new generation makes peace with something specific that is uniquely theirs. There is something about THAT particular negotiation that informs the music with a kind of living, breathing, molecular structure than can never be recreated or even accurately simulated by any other means. Whether it is the addressing of a newly invented musical instrument technique or technology or even the reaction to something that they aren’t crazy about in the previous generations, this is an essential element that ALL of the most successful generations in Jazz have had in common; that they have sophisticatedly illuminated some aspect of their culture in a way that could not be found in any other form — or at any other time — and therefore have NATURALLY drawn an audience to it that was attracted to Jazz to find out something, in return, about themselves.”