The American musician Pat Metheny offered an unforgettable show this Saturday night at the Gran Rex theater, which more than paid for the long wait for his return to the country, excessively postponed as a result of the pandemic that suspended the dates he had scheduled for 2020 .
Guitarist with gigantic compositional and performance capabilities, the 68 year old musician born in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, he arrived at his concert in Buenos Aires accompanied by a notable band, which has been supporting him for years and with whom he recorded “From this Place” in 2020, which served as the basis of the repertoire he delivered last night.
Gwilym Simcock on piano, the extraordinary Australian double bass player Linda May Han Oh and the fine Mexican drummer Antonio Sánchez make up the Metheny quartet that last night opened the sequence of their two shows in the country that closes today at the Gran Rex as part of the tour South American from his show “An Evening with Pat Metheny”.
The concert opened with a Metheny’s solo performance with the rare Pikasso 42-string guitars, which at times seemed to sound like a kind of harp, and then the full band entered, which started powerful and inspired, giving rise to the first applause of a full theater that delivered several in almost three hours of shows.
set as one of the most decisive guitarists of contemporary jazzcreator of his own clearly identifiable sound and very particular notes, Metheny is part of the Olympus of musicians of this North American tradition in his own right and in the Gran Rex show he made manifest the immense stature of his musical gravitation.
The tour was extensive and ranged from revisions of compositions from his first work in 1976 “Bright Size Life”, passing through “Secret Story”, “Still Life” and his most recent materials, alternating moments of unusual speed, combustion and groove of high flight with others in which the musicians seem to want to splinter the silence.
The one that accompanies Metheny is a superlative band, with musicians who are themselves composers and performers of the best on the scene and with their own name who know exactly what and how they should do each thing and thus solve, with a level of rapport and listen to each other overwhelmingly live.
One moment of the concert gave rise to incredible duets between Metheny and each of the musicians, such as a furious and distorting rock performed on nylon string guitar that he did with the drummer; an old song from the Lyle Mays era with the pianist or another, moving one, with LInda May Han Oh, who delivered a solid base all night with an enveloping sound, capable of sustaining the entire band on its own so that the others would take off from the flat.
If the sound of Metheny, of abusive originality, has the ability to evoke unimagined landscapes and open unimagined spaces in the celestial sphereher acting talent is no less amazing.
He played with several guitars, used pedals, distortions or used a nylon string guitar with minimal amplification, and in all circumstances he visited surprising territories, pleasing to the public that filled the theater.
The show “An Evening with Pat Metheny”, which is part of a South American tour that had to be suspended due to the coronavirus pandemichas already passed through Santiago de Chile, Rio de Janeiro and San Pablo, and after Buenos Aires there are the dates of Lima (Wednesday 12) and Mexico City (Saturday 15).
This Saturday, before the performance of the Pat Metheny quartet, the Tucuman singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Manu Sija acted as support, delivering a four-song set of bandoneon, voice and machines.
