Huffington Post has a great interview with Pat Metheny. New Age music is one among many topics in the conversation. It starts like this:
You’re credited as one of the pioneers of new age music and atmospherics. At this point in your career, do you feel like you are still jazz or have you evolved into another kind of genre or music?
Pat Metheny: This discussion, which I’ve been on the front lines of for four years now, is not really a musical discussion. It’s a politcal/cultural discussion. It’s about how we choose to represent ourselves in terms of the cultural context that we’re going to exist in as human beings. I sometimes look at the rock and pop world and there are things like “house” and “emo” and “death metal” and all of these things that don’t really have much to say about the fact that the bass player’s going to play the root on one, somebody’s going to make a big noise on two and four, and it’s going to be in 4/4 and you can count on that. In terms of music, they’re all very deeply connected, but in terms of politics? Man, you don’t want to get in between the death metal dudes and the country western guys. But it doesn’t have much to do with music, it’s a whole bunch of other stuff. The general community of musicians that I have been hanging with and that I am probably a pretty good representative of, we’re not thinking about that stuff. We’re thinking about music as one big thing. I’ve played with David Bowie and I’ve played all written music by Steve Reich. I’ve played free, I’ve played really loud, I’ve played really soft, I’ve played really complicated, I’ve played really simple; it’s been grooving this way, grooving that way.
Read it here.