Happy release day Pat Metheny

There are only a handful of living musicians who can continually reinvent themselves year after year, and even fewer still who can claim to have maintained equal degrees of innovation and sheer excellence across a career spanning decades.

Pat Metheny is one of the few artists in the world who can lay claim to such a description, and that only begins to start the conversation about this unpredictable and unique force in music.

Along with being one of the world’s great guitarists and improvisers, it may be Metheny’s compositional skills that have catapulted him into the singularly reserved territory that caused the great bassist Charlie Haden to describe him as being “beyond category”.

With 'Road To The Sun', Pat Metheny once again surprises and dazzles by revealing yet another new aspect of his seemingly endless ability to harvest new vistas within the expanses of an already impossible to define milieu, all while still retaining the instantly recognizable Metheny sound. With these two major new works for classical guitar, sure to be performed by future musicians for generations, Metheny once again charts a new way of obliterating boundaries between genres while simultaneously unveiling new facets of an already expansive personal language.

Shall we call this classical music then? Metheny responds; “For me, music is one big thing. I never exactly know what people mean when I hear them talking about music based on what often seems to be a description of the more superficial components of one cultural aspect over another. Growing up in a fairly rural place during the time that I did, I didn’t have a very sophisticated awareness of why the Beatles should be thought of as something different from Bach or Ornette or Miles or Stravinsky, I just instinctively responded to how certain music was clearly great music.”

And with Road To The Sun, the depth of his personal conception is presented in a context that that is as clarifying as it is bracing. Here we have two major works, performed not by Metheny himself, but by five of the world's greatest classical guitarists. And yet, that sound, that spirit that makes Metheny’s music so singular is not only present, it takes on colors and dimensions that once again transcend any simple genre-based explanation; it is, as he noted as a kid, just great and extremely creative music.

Metheny: “For me, melody is the most mysterious aspect of music. While we can slice and dice and define and quantify harmony and rhythm in almost endless ways, melody is nearly impervious to that same kind of analysis. Of course, there are the really obvious “melodic” types of things in music, but my sense of what melody is goes beyond the idea of just being singable or something. Somehow my perception of what melody is stands as a kind of invisible glue that holds music together, often in less than obvious ways. The elements that need to be there to make something really work melodically are elusive and rare to me. And looking at things through that lens, I have learned to pay attention to the way that the harmonies and rhythms that I am most drawn to seem to invoke a kind of melodic character as well.

In the end, Road To The Sun is nothing if not another truly great Pat Metheny record. It will sit alongside Secret Story, Bright Size Life, 80/81,One Quiet Night, Still Life (talking), Song X, and all the rest as being yet another unexpected and almost willfully inscrutable plot twist that in the end is as inevitable as it is classic to a genre with only one common element; Metheny himself.

Check out the album HERE.