In 2023, I went to the primary hololive English live performance, Join the World. In my evaluation, I ended off with some idle ideas:
And now that I’ve gone to a live performance for digital idols, who is aware of what’s subsequent? Perhaps I’ll attend some concert events by 100% flesh-and-blood musicians as properly. Sarcastically, the VTuber rabbit gap would possibly simply lead me again to the true world.
Two years later, I lastly made good on this by seeing Pat Metheny at Carnegie Corridor on his Dream Field/MoonDial Tour. Given how increasingly of my favourite creators and artists have been shuffling off this mortal coil, I thought-about him a high precedence, and I’m glad I lastly acquired the prospect.
Whereas Metheny does have a connection to anime because of “Final Prepare Dwelling” getting used as a JoJo’s Weird Journey ending theme, my fondness for his music goes all the best way again to my early childhood, once I first heard in a industrial what I might later study was “It’s For You.” I watched the movie Fandango earlier this yr particularly as a result of I knew that track was featured in it.
I’m the definition of informal fan—I didn’t even understand fairly how a lot music Metheny has made, or that he’s a 20-time Grammy winner, or that he nonetheless places out songs on a reasonably common foundation. I knew he was a beloved musician, however not that he’s within the operating for best jazz guitarist of all time. Although in hindsight, I don’t suppose something may have ready me for the reside expertise.
Metheny simply appears essentially completely different from most musicians I’m aware of—he appears to be much less targeted on making particular person songs and extra about exploring music and sound itself. It may be as a result of I’m not very aware of his very intensive discography, however it felt like I by no means knew the place he was going or what he was going to strive subsequent. At one level, he talked about a guitar maker he works with typically, and the way she takes his concepts for devices and makes them a actuality. In actual fact, this complete live performance was devoted primarily to his latest resolution to make use of the baritone guitar extra, and this included his customized designs. In his previous few songs, Metheny used a bunch of contraptions to document his personal guitars on the spot after which performed them again to turn into a form of one-man band whereas colourful meters flashed and shined. It was an aural and visible cornucopia.
Helpfully for a beginner like myself, he really took time to delve into his life and historical past. Metheny defined how he got here from a household of trumpet gamers, however that he didn’t take to the instrument almost as properly. It was seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Present that uncovered him to electrical guitars and altered his life endlessly, regardless of his household’s preliminary dislike of the newfangled instrument. At a younger age, he began enjoying at well-known spots in his residence state of Missouri. Metheny talked about that he not often ever talks this a lot throughout concert events, so I think about myself lucky on this regard.
This was each a end result of a journey as a listener and the beginning of one thing new. I ponder the place I would go subsequent.
