Pat Metheny plays John Zorn? Why not? At this point in the careers of guitarist Metheny and composer-saxophonist Zorn, should anything surprise us? Metheny, who turns 59 next month, has pleased about as broad and diverse an audience as any instrumentalist: He’s won 20 Grammy Awards in 11 different categories. And yet he sounded as natural alongside Ornette Coleman on 1996’s “Song X” as with his longtime quartet. Zorn, who turns 60 in September, may once have represented a renegade downtown Manhattan scene, but that was long ago. His 60th is being celebrated throughout this year at venues as varied as Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University’s Miller Theater, and the Japan Society — a reflection of the depth, breadth, and reach of his celebrated work.
Musicians of many stripes have found special inspiration in Zorn’s “Book of Angels” — 316 songs that extend his Masada project, a body of music based on scales that are elemental to Jewish music. Metheny is the 20th to head into a recording studio thus inspired, and with Zorn’s blessing and input. His recent “Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels, Vol. 20,” (Nonesuch/Tzadik) is a mesmerizing triumph.
I brought that CD and a few others along with me on a two-week trip to New Orleans. I was alone in a rented apartment in the Marigny section with a boombox-alarm clock next to the bed. Pretty soon, the playlist was all “Tap,” all the time. (My recent review for The Wall Street Journal explains why.) That Journal review was originally intended as a feature story, for which I tracked Metheny down (he was traveling in Brazil) and did an email interview about the project and his connection to Zorn’s music. Here’s that exchange in full:
Musically, what sparked your interest in recording pieces from Zorn’s “Book of Angels”? Why did you want to dig into it?
John is someone who I have admired on many levels for a long time. We began a nice correspondence over the past few years and he sent me a bunch of his recent projects, which was great and really inspiring. I had been following his various Masada projects and had a real admiration for the continuity of it all as well as the range and variety that he offers to the musicians in the pieces. It was just an idea that came to me, that maybe I might be able to offer something to the series.
Except for drummer Antonio Sanchez, the music is performed entirely by you, on various guitars and other instruments, including piano, marimba, flugelhorn, and the Orchestrion, a one-man electromechanical orchestra of your own creation. Is there something about “Book of Angels” that led you to play nearly all the instruments and parts yourself?
Honestly, when I started, I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, but in a good way. I was having fun with it all and kind of getting under the hood a little bit by exploring what John’s thing was really like by way of the notes on the page. So, I was kind of using what tools were readily available to me in my workroom, which includes a bunch of guitars and the various elements that wound up being the instrumentation of the record. It sort of naturally took shape from there. I have done a fairly wide variety of projects like that over the years where it is basically just me, including the records “New Chautauqua” and “Zero Tolerance for Silence,” several film scores (“Passagio per il Paradiso”), and more recently the Orchestrion stuff. To me, that method can be a pretty viable way to define a sound or a feeling that hopefully has some kind of distinct identity.
Zorn told me that although this recording was meticulously produced, each solo part is a first take. Is that true? Why was that important?
I find that it is useful in any project to set a kind of work template that fits the vibe of what you are going for. You may wind up taking a detour from your plan here or there — it isn’t written in stone — but it is good to start with a guide or a set of aspirations. Because of the nature of the tunes and the kind of improvising that I hoped to get to, that seemed to be the most efficient way to get to the result that I hoped to get to.
So much of Zorn’s music sets up strategies, as in his “game pieces.” Did you employ any strategies here that were unusual for you or especially designed for these pieces?
No, because it was done the way it was done on a production level, it was the kind of thing where I started each new piece with a kind of blank slate and let each one sort of tell me what it seemed to want to do.
There is such a broad range of feels and styles here — from propulsive to pensive, clearly pentatonic to much more complex and overlapped. Was that an idea from the start, or did that just happen? Did you set out to conjure many moods and to, in essence, alternate between complexity and tenderness?
When I wrote to John indicating that I would really like to pursue this, he sent me a list of the tunes he thought could be candidates, and that hadn’t been done yet. Within that subgroup of tunes there were a few that immediately jumped out to me and each one seemed to suggest a sound to me, or an approach. I always kind of let the tunes “decide” about orchestration in any context. It is usually really clear that this one wants to be done this way or that way, etc. I just kind of did my best to follow through on those initial impulses and this was the program that emerged from it.
What can you tell me about “Hurmiz,” the closer, which is stunning and sounds very much like it fits within the aesthetic of Zorn’s “event” pieces?
In a way, that is the most traditional approach in that it really does follow the head/solo/head thing while most of the others have other sections and elements. However, I really wanted the soloing to stick very closely to the material that John set up in the initial statement of the melody.
On some level, “Book of Angels” exists somewhat like the book of Thelonious Monk tunes exists — in that there are head/solo/head elements, or essential fragments, but there’s always something more deeply important about the tune’s identity. Is that a meaningful parallel for you? More practically, what existed for you on paper as raw materials and what liberties did you take?
I thought that an interesting approach to this would be to kind of extend the compositions themselves. Sometimes it was through things that were improvised that I later orchestrated, but sometimes through adding counterpoint (as you mentioned), reharmonizing things and just in general, making the kinds of associations that we as improvisers do all the time have a more formal connection to the notes on the page. Setting a framework for each piece was really fun for me and the real testament to John’s writing is the amazing differences that each participant in the series brings to the table and how flexible and inspiring the pieces are. They really invite you to pound on them and they fully retain their essential Zorn-ness no matter what you throw at them.