Pat Metheny Noise Rock
What do Pat Metheny and Dillinger Escape Plan have in common? Turns out, the answer is Pat's 1994 noise rock release, Zero Tolerance for Silence. This crazy album was both critically praised and panned. Let's learn why.
Pat Metheny goes way beyond his signature jazz guitar tone. In this video, we'll dip our toes into some of his most avant garde moments.
Pat’s written response #1 and response #2 about this album.
Thanks to Gregg Bendian for his excellent contributions to this video.
Check out The Sign of 4.
Video Transcript
Take a listen to this and tell me who’s playing…
The name Pat Metheny brings a few things to mind: jazz guitarist with amazing tone, beautiful hollow-body guitars, giant hair, black and white striped sweaters, and weird picking technique. One thing I never think is: avant garde noise rock.
But guess what! Pat has some very, very strange music that goes pretty far outside the box. First is an album he released in 1994 called “Zero Tolerance for Silence.” (Thanks to the Make Weird Music social media community for pointing me to this album.)
There’s a fun story about it on wikipedia. In short, music critic Tim Griggs theorized it as Metheny’s “way of saying ‘screw you’ to the label” and end his contract with Geffen records. Metheny dispelled this theory 14 years after the album’s release by saying: “I would never do something like that. [...] That record speaks for itself in its own musical terms. To me, it is a 2-D view of a world in which I am usually functioning in a more 3-D way. It is entirely flat music…”
The first track, titled “Part 1,” is straight out of Dillinger Escape Plan songbook. I mean, add Chris Pennie’s bombastic drums and you’re done, but do it for over 18 minutes and while the Dillenger guys were in elementary school. Honestly, I didn’t believe this was actually a Metheny track until I saw enough evidence to suggest otherwise.
The second track will please Henry Cow and Fred Frith fans. It evolves over time into a blues-rock jam that’s interesting, but also sounds like five intentional guitarists noodling at Guitar Center. The third part actually resonated with me because I’ve recorded pieces of music like it. Hard to explain, but it’s dark and really connecting the fingers with the guitar and its potential sloppiness. This continues into Part IV, but this track is way more riff-driven. It’s got great drive and rhythm; an actual toe-tapper if you can get past the dissonance.
The fifth and final part introduces acoustic guitar and lots of what I’ll call intonational flexibility. Like, at its heart, there’s a really beautiful piece of music we’d expect from Pat, but since this is a “2-D” view of how he sees the world, it’s familiar while missing an axis. Almost as if Salvador Dalí painted a typical Metheny song and then Pat played that.
Zero Tolerance wasn’t a critical success and, frankly, who freaking cares about critical success? I’m going to guess it wasn’t a financial success either, but Metheny’s most adventurous fans say it’s his greatest work. Of course, a huge number of his fans think it’s a waste of time and are convinced the Geffen record deal rumor was true. As usual with a release like this, it’s quite polarizing. And I am grateful it exists. The world needs more established artists exploring these fringe boundaries. In fact, on his website, someone asked if he notated any of it or if it was fully improvised. He said some of it was written out, but not in conventional notation, which reminds me of the insane scores I’ve seen Ryan Carraher post on Instagram.
I asked avant garde musician and Metheny collaborator Gregg Bendian about this disc and how to listen to it. Here’s what he had to say.
[Gregg Bendian discusses Sign of Four]
Another polarizing release from Metheny includes a three-disc release called “The Sign of Four” featuring Derek Bailey, Gregg Bendian, and Paul Wertico. If you’re unfamiliar with Derek Bailey, he’s one of the earliest players in the free improvisation and free jazz movements. In other words, a lot of his releases are—pretty out there.
Bailey has worked with all the “popular” names in the weirdest of weird music. Fred Frith, John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Jamie Muir, and a ton of others. Lots of people listen to Bailey’s performances and say, “This isn’t music. This is noise.” But avant garde fans don’t always prioritize the idiomatic musical experiences of rhythm, harmony, or melody. Instead, it’s more about interactions, textures, dynamics, improvisation, and other aspects that mainstream listeners de-prioritize. Like any other music, it evokes emotions, but it can be difficult to face and identify with those emotions.
And that’s exactly what we have with “The Sign of Four.” I’ll be honest with you, the first time I listened to all three of these discs, I didn’t get it. But in preparation for this video, I listened again and I have to say—I still didn’t get it but I appreciated it a little more. Fun anecdote, I found out the other day that our very own André Cholmondeley was in the audience for the live performance on disc 3 and you can hear him shouting Derek Bailey’s name at the end of the last track.
I asked Gregg about this album, too, and how listeners should approach it.
[Gregg Bendian discusses how it was mixed, how the discs were arranged, why it’s three discs, which to listen to first, etc.]
One of my favorite indicators: there are as many one-star reviews as there are five-star reviews on Amazon. And there are barely any three-star reviews. The jazz-loving Metheny fans don’t appreciate the lack of discernible music. The avant-garde-loving Bailey fans don’t appreciate Metheny dipping his toes into avant-garde and being mixed louder than Bailey.
I generally believe that when you can’t please both sides, you’re probably doing something right. In this case, I really don’t know. I’m not qualified to evaluate this music, but I do know that these four artists are masters in their craft. Let’s listen to a clip:
[SIGN OF 4 CLIP]
Metheny is definitely a guitarist who doesn’t fit in a box, but at least 80% of his music is identifiable as Pat Metheny. Then there’s the album he did with saxophonist Ornette Coleman “Song X,” which I’d say is the gateway drug for Metheny fans into that lesser-known and understood realm. It features Jack DeJohnette on drums and Charlie Haden on upright bass.
“Song X” is a way more straightforward jazz album—until it isn’t. There are melodies, plenty of toe-tapping moments, crazy solos, and a lot more meat for someone with more conventional listening expectations. Definitely check out the twentieth anniversary release, which has two X’s in masking tape on the cover.
[Gregg Bendian discusses what is special about this album, what can more mainstream listeners listen for, why it’s a bridge into something else]
Anyway, if you take a listen to these albums, let us know what you think. I picked up a copy of Zero Tolerance for Silence on Ebay for less than $15, but on Amazon the price is, like, $500. I know some of you are going to eat this avant-garde Metheny stuff up and a lot of you are going to go, “It’s trash.” That’s what’s fun about this kind of music. You never know what’s going to stick with people and whether they’ll eat their own words years later. I’m sure someday I’ll listen to “Sign of the Four” and go, “I can’t believe I missed that.”
I want to close with Pat’s excellent response to someone’s complaint about Zero Tolerance for Silence:
anyone who is alienated by that record (or any of the others for that matter) is welcome to their own musical world that we all are in the continuous process of defining for ourselves - whether listeners or players. i guess my point is that no rationalization is necessary when it comes to playing the music that one likes.
Thanks to Gregg Bendian for his input on this video. Check out the interview we just did with him and look through his tremendous discography. His “Interzone” projects are a great place to start.
