Metheny made one point very clearly in an interview with LJN via Zoom. Whereas he writes a lot of tunes, he always submits them to his own tough test. He needs to be persuaded that the tune is strong and robust enough for him to want to go out on stage and play it at least 150 times. And most of the tunes he writes, he says, don’t pass that personal and self-imposed test. Or as he expresses it: “The batting average for the standard that I hope to aspire to is low.”

The title Dream Box has multiple meanings. “Box” is jazz slang for a hollow-body guitar, and Dream Box showcases many different guitar sounds. But the word “dream” is the key here: “Dreams in their broadest sense make up the vibe with this set,” Metheny explains. “Music exists for me in an elusive state, often at its best when discovered apart from any particular intention.”

Metheny's discography is a testament to his influence and talent, with 50 recordings and 20 Grammy wins across twelve different categories. From his groundbreaking album New Chautauqua, (ECM, 1979), which redefined instrumental steel-stringed Americana, to his exploration of free-improv in Zero Tolerance for Silence (Geffen Records, 1994) and the innovative use of technology in The Orchestrion Project, (Nonesuch, 2013) Metheny consistently pushes the boundaries of what a solo performer can achieve. From those listening sessions, I gradually sifted through everything to find this program emerging as a coherent whole. I found that I had unintentionally gotten to a destination I had not planned for, and I am excited to share what was buried in there. The new compositions are highlights, tracing their central motifs to unexpected destinations. While some of Metheny’s best original work this century has spoken to his ambition as a composer (2005’s The Way Up), his aim here is for simple but immersive mood-setting. After an introduction of electric guitar against chiming, slightly dissonant acoustic chords, the gorgeous “Ole & Gard” swiftly finds its feet and cycles through various settings to return to a recurring bluesy refrain. “From the Mountains” is more formless but just as memorable, navigating its eight-minute runtime with a dreamy sense of focus: The effect is like watching the sun rise over an unfamiliar city, new contours filling in as the light starts to spread.

When it comes to thinking about the simplicity and robustness of compositions, Metheny works in a context and a framework: “A standard is set by Monk’s ‘Round Midnight’,” he says. Dream Box follows 2021’s studio album Road to the Sun and live recording Side-Eye NYC, making it the third release on Metheny’s own record label Modern Records, an imprint of BMG. I was inducted into The Kansas Music Hall Of Fame in 2008 with Pat Metheny. I was considered a pioneer in using special tunings on the acoustic guitar in creating my unique, poetic songs. I toured as a “solo” opening act for many iconic bands and artists including: BB King, The Jefferson Airplane, Jethro Tull, Linda Ronstadt, John Denver, POCO, John Lee Hooker, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Hot Tuna, Brewer & Shipley and MANY others.

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This past year was a particularly busy travel year for me, with about 160 performances worldwide. In the course of all that travel, I found myself returning to that discovered folder lots of times, genuinely surprised at what I was finding in there. Despite a catalog of 50 recordings that have won 20 Grammys in twelve different categories, Metheny’s “complex and restlessly curious musical sensibility” (The Guardian) continues to lead him in new directions. As Pat says in the liner notes: Some commentators have suggested that his approach to integrating technology makes him a fore-runner or precursor of Artificial Intelligence. Here again he is clear as to the parts he wants to embrace and the aspects that simply have no interest for him at all in his permanent striving to be a better musician: “When I think about how to apply my interest in music through the prism of what tech offers I feel very strongly that – as the tech saying has it – ‘Garbage in. Garbage out’. If you don’t have a good story to tell, a good melody, and you can’t play that good, none of this is going to help. It is just going to amplify that it isn’t happening….” He said that the true answer to the question of his attitude to technology is that he has no fear, “I’m like: ‘Yeah, bring it on!’ To me they are more tools, just another way to be. It is another way to find a window or a trap door into this ever-expanding house that I have been working on.” Please consider spreading the word about Pat’s new album and touras well as Jazz Guitar Life by sharing this article amongst your social media pals and please feel free to leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you🙂

But surely Artificial Intelligence also has dangers? He gives a balanced answer: “I know everyone is freaking out about it but for me it is a unique set of possibilities. It will need a lot of decisions on how It gets utilised and the way it gets disseminated.” Or if you’re Pat Metheny, you might ask: What would this sound like stripped down to just two sad, solitary electric guitars? The 68-year-old virtuoso’s rendition is a highlight on Dream Box, an understated set of new solo recordings that he compiled during downtime on tour buses and in hotel rooms around the world. On the road last year, Metheny sorted through a folder on his computer where he had stored these casual, off-hours experiments: cover songs, jazz standards, and new melodies captured as soon as they occurred to him. In the liner notes, Metheny describes the songs as “moments in time” more than proper compositions. “I have almost no memory of having recorded most of them,” he admits. “They just kind of showed up.”He remembers having learnt and evolved his self-critical approach originally from observing and discussing Steve Swallow. Metheny remembers being surprised by some of the tunes which Swallow would reject. These days he identifies much more with that kind of self-critical rigour.

The focus here is on electric guitar, but maybe more to the point; quiet electric guitar. It is an area of particular interest for me. A goal has always been to have a touch on the electric that might get me as close to the kind of phrase-by-phrase dynamics that can occur naturally with an acoustic instrument. In fact, using an electric in this way is quite a bit harder than what occurs naturally with an acoustic. There is one more step between the touch of the player and the listener that has to be accounted for. Usually, the only time I get to listen to my own stuff is while on the road. I often say I live on output, with little or no time for input. That changes on tour, where suddenly there seems to be more free hours in the day, albeit on a bus or in some far-flung hotel room. Occasionally, those moments offer a chance to rummage around in the files to see if anything interesting may lie there. I have over 50 CDs and singles on Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and other global music curators. Meanwhile, Metheny has a host of tour dates lined up in the U.S. and Europe with his Side-Eye Trio. Launched in 2016 as a platform for up-and-coming players, this iteration features pianist Chris Fishman and drummer Joe Dyson. The Side-Eye tour begins in June and moves to Europe in July. Beginning in September, Metheny launches a fall tour in support of Dream Box with destinations throughout the U.S.For an artist whose name has become synonymous with sleek, smooth hyper-technicality—your guitar teacher’s favorite guitarist—Metheny remains underrated for his unending drive to experiment and challenge himself. While his feathery style on the fretboard remains as distinctive as his robust and permanently windswept mane, no two of his records involve quite the same approach, whether that means finding new collaborators, new instrumentation, or on releases like Dream Box, new ways to channel his creative process. In fact, Dream Boxmight become too placid for its own good if it weren’t possible to detect the exertion required for the pinpoint accuracy of the guitarist’s fingering on those respective fretboards. Still, as the palpable tranquility abides during the course of Sammy Kahn’s standard “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” the innate precision ofMetheny’s playing is so sure it ultimately sounds effortless. And yet surely, I wondered, Metheny has always been interested in the possibilities of technology, it is part of his essence. He agrees: “I am an electric guitarist. My first act was to plug it in. Cords, knobs and wires are all part of the instrument. I happened to be born at a point that traverses all of this stuff, and my fundamental relationship to knobs wires and electricity has expanded along with it.” In a sequence of events Pat describes so straightforwardly on the single double-sided sheet insert within the CD, the Missouri native played each piece no more than once on an electric guitar and a baritone instrument. Meanwhile, long-time engineer and collaborator Pete Karam recorded, mixed, and mastered the six original pieces and three outside compositions in consultation with a former member of a latter-day Pat Metheny Group, bassist Steve Rodby.