The Emergence of The Rural American Ideal in Jazz

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The Emergence of the Rural American

Ideal in Jazz: Keith Jarrett and Pat
Metheny on ECM Records
David Ake
Published online: 12 Jan 2007.
To cite this article: David Ake (2007) The Emergence of the Rural American Ideal in
Jazz: Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny on ECM Records, Jazz Perspectives, 1:1, 29-59, DOI:
10.1080/17494060601061014
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Jazz Perspectives
Vol. 1, No. 1, May 2007, pp. 2959
The Emergence of the Rural American

Ideal in Jazz: Keith Jarrett and Pat
Metheny on ECM Records
Downloaded by [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] at 20:40 22 June 2014
David Ake
Jazz has long been identified as an urban genre. Certainly, the standard historical
narratives trace a metropolitan lineage: New Orleans to Chicago to Kansas City to
New York, with other cities inside and outside the United States playing somewhat
lesser roles. Scholars and laypersons alike have understood jazz as not only presented
primarily in urban areas, but also as among the foremost aural representations of city
living.1 Dozens of jazz-related song and album titles support these understandings.
Such titles memorialize a favorite municipality (Ornette Colemans New York Is
Now), neighborhood (Harlem in Take the A Train), thoroughfare (Central
Avenue Breakdown), or cultural landmark (Stompin at the Savoy). This is not to
say that less-populated areas have not contributed. Many well-known players
including some discussed belowhailed from small-town and rural America.
However, all of these jazz musicians eventually moved to and made their names in
one city or another. In each case, the urban environment offered the promise of
increased professional opportunities and a heightened sense of energy and
excitement.
Using such historical contexts as a backdrop, this paper addresses the emergence of
a decidedly different geo-cultural milieu for jazz, one that, while sometimes
physically composed, performed, or distributed in cities, evokes various idealized
visions of an America far from the bustle and hum of the metropolis. Of course,
practitioners in the United States of folk, country, and some blues styles have long
extolled the virtues of rural or untamed spaces. Likewise, European and American
composers of Western art music have an equally established tradition of evoking
pastoral imagery and nature (real or imagined). As musicologist Richard Leppert has
shown, many of these musiciansand his list includes Beethoven, Schubert, and
Wagner, as well as a host of othersvalorized nature, increasingly placed in binary
opposition to culture.2 Yet, while a rural ideal in these genres may be fairly
1
For example, the promotional copy to Leroy Ostranskys book, Jazz City, claims that jazz, a
phenomenon intricately bound up with the history of America, is a musical reflection of the growth of
our cities. From the back cover of Leroy Ostransky, Jazz City: The Impact of Our Cities on the
Development of Jazz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978).
2
Richard Leppert, Paradise, Nature, and Reconciliation, or a Tentative Conversation with Wagner,
Puccini, Adorno, and the Ronettes, Echo 4.1 (Spring 2002), http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume4Issue1/leppert/leppert3.html (accessed August 10, 2006).
ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17494060601061014
30
The Emergence of the Rural American Ideal in Jazz
commonplace, even customary, jazz has been so closely linked to the city for so long
that a subgenre that suggests anything other than a cosmopolitan sophistication
seems contrary to expectations.
Non-urban approaches to jazz differentiate themselves from their city-based
cousins through evocative album cover images and programmatic titles, as well as a
palate of timbres, chord progressions, and rhythms that, perhaps inevitably, borrows
from country, folk, rock, and Euro-American art music. But the implications of this
trend go beyond mere sounds, pictures, and song names. Taken as a whole, this
music draws on and reinforces what musicologist Beth Levy has called two of this
countrys most powerful national myths: the United States as a confederation
founded upon self-sufficient agricultural enterprise and America as the glorious
realization of westward expansion.3 More important, they shed light on a subgenre
of jazz that is unusual for being rooted as much (or more) in European-American
rural culture as in African American urban culture. Almost all of the musicians
discussed in this essay are white, and this fact plays a significant role in discerning
where this music comes from and to whom they may be speaking.
The jazz styles discussed below do not present a single, unified vision of a bucolic
America. Quite the contrary, in fact, they express and explore a broad range of styles
and attitudes. What unifies this body of musicand this is the point I want to
emphasize in this paperis the shared idealization of non-urban spaces and lifestyles.
Such a profound shift in jazzs location (if sometimes only an imagined location)
bears attention, as it hints at larger changes in participation and meaning as the
music heads into its second century.
An Unlikely Fusion
From 2002 to 2004, Norah Joness CD Come Away with Me provided a seemingly
ubiquitous soundscape for patrons at Starbucks coffee houses and other upscale
emporiums around the United States. Both the discs lead single, Dont Know
Why, and its title track each garnered extensive airplay. The albums phenomenal
sales also catapulted Jones to the top of both Billboards Contemporary Jazz chart and
its Top 200 album chart.4 To be sure, commercial success for young, attractive,
breathy female singers of jazz-inflected popular music was nothing new. Cassandra
Wilson, Diana Krall, and Jane Monheit trod similar paths in the years immediately
preceding Joness triumph. What made Norah Joness case somewhat surprising,
however, was the inclusion of so many characteristics typically associated with
country music. These characteristics were most obvious in her rendition of Hank
3
Beth Levy, The White Hope of American Music: Or, How Roy Harris Became Western, American
Music 19 (Summer 2001): 132.
4
Norah Jones, Come Away with Me, Blue Note 32088, 2002, compact disc. This CD was released by jazz
stalwart Blue Note Records. The company notably described the music as jazz informed. Following its
release, the disc received extensive attention in DownBeat, JazzTimes, and other jazz-oriented
publications.
Jazz Perspectives
31
Williamss Cold, Cold Heart, but related textures are also heard in the acoustic
guitar work and Floyd Kramer-like piano fills throughout her disc.5
Beyond the hybrid music of a small coterie of artists such as Bob Wills, David
Grisman, and a few others, the words country and jazz have rarely been uttered
in the same breath, least of all by members of the mainstream jazz contingent.6 For
decades, jazz performers, composers, critics, and fans have derided country music
and related genres as a sort of musical wasteland, or worse. For most proponents of
jazz, country hardly seems to be music at all, but rather simplistic pabulum by and
for dull, white hicks. As Richard Peterson noted in his book Creating Country
Music, city dwellers in the early decades of the twentieth century considered country
(then known as hillbilly) music the antithesis of their own aesthetic and
worldview because it evoked the image of rural poverty and small-town morality that
so many in the rapidly urbanizing American society were trying to escape.7 In these
ways, country represented the polar opposite of the worldliness of jazz. The degree to
which the aesthetics and understandings of jazz and country music have traditionally
diverged can be witnessed in Sonny Rollinss 1957 release, Way Out West.8 As seen in
Figure 1, the cover of that album shows the saxophonist in the desert attired in a tengallon hat and chaps, with a holster by his side (but no six shooter, as his saxophone
serves as his weapon). Though perfectly natural for, say, a record by country singer
Gene Autry, such an illustration is clearly meant in this case as a tongue-in-cheek play
on racial and musical stereotypes.9 Beyond the self-conscious, cowboy-kitsch
5
In one way or another, each of these singers play with genre boundaries and stereotypes. Wilson
typically explores the terrain of acoustic blues, while Monheit and Krall traverse the more familiar (if
sometimes more blurry) line separating jazz from cabaret, pop, or Broadway.
6
Thanks to Lewis Porter for reminding me of Buddy Richs famous joke that he [Rich] was allergic to
nothing but country music. Despite Rich and the many other antagonists, jazz musicians from all eras
of the music have at least toyed with country idioms. Perhaps the most intriguing early instance of jazz/
country collaboration was the July 1930 recording of Blue Yodel No. 9, which paired Jimmie Rodgers,
the Father of Country Music, with Louis Armstrong on trumpet and (most likely) Lil Armstrong on
piano. Jimmie Rodgers, Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standin on a Corner), Victor 23580, 1930, 78-rpm;
reissued on Jimmie Rodgers, On the Way Up, Rounder 1058, 1991, compact disc. Further examples
include guitarist Lenny Breau, who performed as Lone Pine Junior at twelve years of age with his
parents country band and later performed alongside Chet Atkins (Atkins himself was respected for his
jazz skills). Perhaps the most relevant figure for this study is vibraphonist Gary Burton who made records
as a young man alongside country musicians Hank Garland (also a fine jazz player), Boots Randolph,
and (again) Chet Atkins. Burtons name will surface again in this essay. One might also be tempted to
cite Ray Charless 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western (ABC-Paramount 410, 1962, LP),
but by the time that record was released, Charles was widely recognized as an R&B singer. While Modern
Sounds certainly worked against racial/musical stereotypes, the geographic and/or cultural loci of the jazz
genre were not really in play.
7
Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), 6.
8
Sonny Rollins, Way Out West, Fantasy 7530, 1957, LP.
9
William Claxton, photographer of the Rollins disc, claims that it was just this image that inspired Mel
Brooks to make his film Blazing Saddles (Warner Bros., 1974), which starred Cleavon Little in the
unlikely role of a black sheriff in an otherwise all-white Western town. See http://www.greatyarmouthlive.
com/news/t_section_info.php?page5William_Claxton_-_Legendary_Jazz_Photographer (accessed
August 10, 2006). Blazing Saddles also features an incongruous scene that involves the Count Basie
Orchestra playing April in Paris in the middle of the Western plains.
32
Figure 1 Album cover photo to Sonny Rollins, Way Out West (1957). Image courtesy of
Fantasy Records.
references that result from acts like Rollins performing Im an Old Cowhand, the
album makes very few musical allusions to rural musical topics. Yet, with Norah
Jones and her band, there it was: country and jazz brought together in the music itself
in an engaging and intelligent way. Moreover, this music was enjoyed by a broad
range of the listening public. And Jones was not the only instance of such blending in
the new millennium.
In a 2003 article for the roots music magazine No Depression, writer Geoffrey
Himes pointed to Seattle, Washington, as the hub for another group of musicians
engaged in blending country, folk and jazz.10 Himes provides telling interviews with,
and commentary on, the scenes principal performerskeyboardist Wayne Horvitz,
pianist/singer Robin Holcomb, and guitarist Bill Frisell (who also appears as a guest
on Norah Joness disc). Himess article offers especially discerning insights on the
10
Geoffrey Himes, A New Intersection at the Crossroads: Bill Frisell, Robin Holcomb, Wayne Horvitz,
and Danny Barnes Cultivate a Common Ground Between Country and Jazz in Seattle. No Depression
43 (January/ February 2003). Archived at http://www.nodepression.net/archive/nd43/features/seattlejazz.html (accessed August 10, 2006).
Jazz Perspectives
33
compositions and recordings these artists produce and the circumstances that
enabled the sounds. He suggests, for instance, that since neither Seattles jazz scene
nor its country music scene had ever attracted much attention beyond the regional
level, the musicians there were not tied down to set notions of purity or
tradition in either genre and thus more free to experiment with both. Himes
devotes extensive space to Frisell, and focuses particular attention on the guitarists
1997 release Nashville, which he describes as catalytic, suggesting a larger trend was
under way.11
By the time he made Nashville, Frisell had already established a formidable
reputation for himself as a performer, composer, and bandleader on a number of
other genre-blurring projects during a dynamic stint in New Yorks downtown
music community in the 1980s. But this recording seemed different, even for
someone who appeared to revel in jazz-inflected musical diversity. The project was
recorded in Tennessee and featured respected Nashville-based players Viktor Krauss
(bass), Pat Bergeson (harmonica), Adam Steffey (mandolin), Ron Block (banjo and
acoustic guitar), and Jerry Douglas (dobro). So unlike Frisells 1993 release Have a
Little Faith, which presented songs from a dizzying range of North American
composers (Aaron Copland, Madonna, Bob Dylan, Stephen Foster, Muddy Waters,
and Charles Ives, among others) but delivered in a postmodern style typical of the
downtown scene, Nashville actually highlighted bluegrass- and country-oriented
musicians at home, literally and stylistically, and so seemed to uphold a quirky sort
of country authenticity while still being marketed as a jazz disc.12
Frisell hails originally from Denver and, recalling the Nashville session, told Himes
that,
When I grew up in Colorado, country was around the periphery all the time but
I tried to ignore it and even actively resisted it. When I was a teenager, the rock n
roll that I likedstuff by Dylan and the Byrdshad a lot of country in it, but as
soon as I discovered jazz, I became a total jazz snob and shut the door on
everything else.
But when I did this Nashville project, I realized I had heard a lot of country
music over the years, and I realized I really liked it. And when I let myself like it, I
became fascinated with trying to find what it had in common with jazz. I started
listening to a lot of older music from the early part of the century, the Harry Smith
Anthology [of American Folk Music], the Library of Congress recordings, and the old
blues guys.13
11
Bill Frisell, Nashville, Elektra/Nonescuh 79415, 1997, compact disc. Besides Jones and Frisell, other
contemporary artists mixing jazz with folk, country, or bluegrass include Bela Fleck, the Hot Club of
Cowtown, and Sam Bush. Bushs 2004 CD, King of the World (Sugar Hill 3987), includes a cut called
Mahavishnu Mountain Boys, a title that playfully references guitarist John McLaughlins 1970s jazzrock fusion band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
12
Nashville peaked at #21 on Billboards Contemporary Jazz chart in 1997. For more on Have a Little
Faith, see the chapter Jazz Traditioning: Setting Standards at Centurys Close, in my book Jazz
Cultures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
13
Quoted in Himes, New Intersection.
34
Frisells comments here are instructive, both in the way they highlight the prevalent
hierarchy upheld by some that would place jazz well above country and other popular
styles (I became a total jazz snob, when I let myself like it, etc.), and in the
specific subgenres of country that Frisell wanted to explore (authentic field
recordings and early commercial releases that are seen as the roots of the genre;
that is, the Carter Family matters, while current Music City heartthrob, Kenny
Chesney, is beyond serious consideration). Himes applauds the efforts of Frisell and
the other members of the Seattle contingent for bringing these worlds together in a
subgenre he calls pastoral jazz. However, he stops short of crediting the group with
instigating the trend; for that he cites Munich-based ECM Records.
In his 2001 article published in the Chicago Tribune (and covering much of the
same ground as the 2003 No Depression essay) Himes wrote that,
It was ECM that first inspired the notion of pastoral jazz. Just because jazz had
always been an urban musicreflecting the jittery rhythms, metallic horns and
surging energy of American citiesdidnt mean that it always had to be. In ECMs
signature soundthe patiently unfolding arrangements, the softly glowing tones
and the slurred legato phrasingperceptive observers spied the possibility of a
rural jazz, a shared improvisation reflecting farms and forests rather than streets
and skyscrapers.14
Himes is correct. Some of the jazz musicians who recorded for ECM, including Frisell
himself, had evoked rural regions (American and otherwise) as far back as the early
1970s. But his assertion raises some important questions. Namely, why did these
artists feel a need to depict farms and forests in jazz? More to the point, what does
the emergence of this pastoral music tell us about the changing social and cultural
climate for jazz?
To begin to address these questions, it will help to recall ECMs founding amidst
the broader cultural scenes of the 1970s. In the course of examination, we will explore
the key roles played by two musicians born in the United StatesKeith Jarrett and
Pat Methenyin shaping an idealized notion of non-urban America through varying
types of pastoral jazz.
ECM and the Dual Legacy of the 1960s
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen
people, whose breast he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine
virtue.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Query XIX (1785).
As suggested in the above quotation, the roots of an idealized rural life run to the very
foundation of the United States. Jeffersons thoughts were echoed in the nineteenth
14
Geoffrey Himes, Hybrid Harmony: Bill Frisell Pitches His Tent at the Intersection of Country and
Jazz, Chicago Tribune, April 20, 2001, p. 3. Republished online with the new title Pastoral Jazz and the
Unspoken Code, http://www.jazzhouse.org/library/index.php3?read5himes1 (accessed August 8,
2006).
Jazz Perspectives
35
century when a back-to-the-land aestheticwhich venerated nature and a

simple lifestylepermeated the Transcendentalist philosophies of Henry David
Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Brook Farm founder George Ripley, as well as
the paintings of Thomas Cole and his fellow artists of the Hudson River School.15
That aesthetic impulse reasserted itself at the turn of the twentieth century with both
the founding of the national park system under Theodore Roosevelt and the popular
success of the anthology, Our National Parks, which collected John Muirs wildlife
essays.16 Three decades later, this pastoral theme resonated with Depression-era
populist principles, as the art of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and Walker
Evans depicted in different ways a spacious nation stocked with hearty, if stoic,
inhabitants, just as Roy Harris, Ferde Grofe, and Aaron Copland were developing the
art-music equivalent of the bold North American landscape painting.17
Though the Americanized versions of the pastoral jazz that ECM fostered in the
1970s are closely related to these and other varied expressions of an open and free
rusticity, the jazz subgenre at issue can be heard most clearly and directly as an
extension ofand somewhat paradoxically, as also a reaction againstthe
collectivist principles of 1960s counterculture. During that decade, a highly visible
contingent of American youth became dissatisfied with what they viewed as the
futility of trying to change the Establishment from within. In a move that is now
almost as mythologized as (and was undoubtedly influenced by) Thoreaus escape to
Walden Pond a century earlier, this mostly white and middle class youth subculture
dropped out of the mainstream and extolled the virtues of communal agrarian living.
At the same time, rock musicians, many of whom had previously churned out
revved-up blues-based material, began to produce roots-oriented songs and albums
that incorporated country-, folk-, and bluegrass-related lyrics and instrumental
textures.18
15
Ripley, a former Transcendentalist minister, founded Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in
1841 as an agrarian utopia designed to wed intellectual life and manual labor. The project died six years
later in the wake of internal disagreements and a fire that destroyed much of the compound.
16
John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901; reprint, San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books, 1991).
17
For more on the nature-inspired music of these composers, see Brooks Tolliver, Eco-ing in the
Canyon: Ferde Grofes Grand Canyon Suite and the Transformation of Wilderness, Journal of the
American Musicological Society 57 (Summer 2004): 32567; Denise von Glahn, The Sounds of Place: Music
and the American Cultural Landscape (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003); and Levy, The
White Hope.
18
Compare, for instance, the Grateful Deads 1970 Workingmans Dead (Warner Bros. WS-1869, LP) and
1971 American Beauty (Mobile Fidelity MFS-1-014, LP) with the groups earlier, more rock-, blues-,
and psychedelic-tinged releases, the 1968 album Anthem of the Sun (Warner Bros. WS-1749, LP) and 1969
Aoxomoxoa (Warner Bros. WS-1790, LP). Meanwhile, after shocking the folk-revivalist movement by
going electric at Newport in 1965, Dylan turned around and released a string of country-inflected
recordings, beginning with the 1968 album John Wesley Harding (Columbia C-2804, LP) and running
through the 1969 Nashville Skyline (Columbia HE-49825, LP) and 1970 New Morning (Columbia KC30290, LP). Similarly, at this time, Dylans sidemen began recording their own material as The Band
(from 1968 forward), with a number of Robbie Robertson compositions that drew heavily on rural
Americana.
36
As attractive as such musical evocations of rural life became for many rockoriented musicians and listeners during the mid-to-late 1960s, this trend had little
interaction with the prevalent jazz ethos of the time. Such images and sounds were
particularly anathema among the vast majority of post-bop and free-jazz musicians in
New York and other Northern areas who, with few exceptions, reveled in their
urbanity.19 As noted, the proponents of these latter genres largely rejected rural
music, particularly white rural music from the South. In jazz circles, idioms such as
folk, country, and bluegrass were considered musically backward, if not something
more socially nefarious. As Olivia Mather shows in her forthcoming study of country
rock, early 1960s media coverage of the battles between Civil Rights advocates and
segregationists in the South tainted country musics reputation for many years to
come, specifically through the connection of several country artists to George
Wallaces campaigns, but also through a kind of guilt by association, where the music
of white, working class Southerners was equated with racist and reactionary
politics.20
Despite the prevailing urbanized sentiments of the dominant jazz culture, a few
young jazz musicians began to express a kinship with the ideals of the emerging folk/
rural/rock-based movement. Among this jazz minority was Keith Jarrett (born 1945),
a white pianist and composer, who, after spending a brief time with Art Blakeys Jazz
Messengers, began making a name for himself in a group led by the AfricanAmerican saxophonist and flutist, Charles Lloyd. Lloyds group enjoyed surprising
success among the burgeoning flower-power ethos on the West Coast. Jarretts
biographer, Ian Carr, points out that, Jarrett and [Lloyds drummer Jack]
DeJohnette were younger than [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney and had
grown up with ears attuned to the Beatles and rock music, and so were solidly of the
sixties generation.21 Around this same time, Jarrett began recording as a leader,
performing instrumental versions of Dylans My Back Pages (on Somewhere Before,
1968) and Joni Mitchells All I Want to Do (Mourning of a Star, 1971), as well as
his own folk-revival compositions (Restoration Ruin, 1968) on which he plays
acoustic guitar and earnestly sings of nature and love.22 These activities leave little
doubt about Jarretts sympathetic stance toward the counterculture. Jarrett
confirmed this sentiment himself in a 1987 interview when he recalled, I shared a
lot of the questions that people [who] came to [rock-oriented venues like] the
Fillmore had. Outside of music, I mean, just the questions, the life-size, universe-size
19
The gospel-soaked sounds of saxophonist Albert Ayler could be heard as a notable exception to this
rule, and one could argue that elements of the hard bop subgenre, particularly Cannonball Adderleys
work, reflected a distinctly African American return to earthy Southern roots. Still, jazz overwhelmingly
remained a sound of the city throughout the 1960s.
20
Olivia Mather, Cosmic American Music: Region, Nation, and Country Rock, 19651975 (Ph.D. diss.,
UCLA, forthcoming).
21
Ian Carr, Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music (New York: Da Capo), 32.
22
Keith Jarrett, Restoration Ruin, Vortex 2008, 1968, LP; reissued with Art Ensemble of Chicago, Baptizum, Collectables, Col-CD-6274, 1999, compact disc; Somewhere Before, Atlantic SD-8808-2, 1968,
LP (reissued Atlantic WPCR 25007, 1990, compact disc); The Mourning of a Star, Atlantic SD-1596,
1971, LP (reissued Wounded Bird Records WOU 1596, 2001, compact disc).
Jazz Perspectives
37
questions.23 Jarretts youthful, rural-hippie leanings during the 1960s were echoed
in many of his ECM recordings a few years later.
As I suggested above, however, the rise of a pastoral sound in the 1970s can also be
seen as a turning away from the 1960s vision of a universal idealism. Whether caused
by the inability to end the conflict in Vietnam, the tragedy at the Rolling Stones
concert at Altamont Speedway in December 1969, or the transitions of most 1960s
youth into the inevitable responsibilities of adulthood, the opening of the 1970s saw
many of those same young Americans distancing themselves from their former wideeyed optimism.24 The drastic degree to which attitudes in rock music had shifted
away from the supposedly all-encompassing Aquarian spirit can be heard in Nick
Lowe and Elvis Costellos questioning 1974 plea to their now-cynical contemporaries,
(Whats So Funny Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?25
While the popular designation of the 1970s as The Me Generation oversimplified the realities of the time, there is little question that the post-Woodstock
period did witness a hunkering down of sorts, with a concomitant rise of smaller,
more closely knit, regional communities in popular music. For example, that decade
marked the birth of both punk and disco, two signature music styles from different
East Coast communities. More tellingly, in the 1970s, popular music listeners also
heard the heated anti-Southern politics of California-based singer/songwriter Neil
Young in his highly popular songs, Southern Man and Alabama, just as the
United States saw the brief-but-bright flowering of Southern rock, with its proud
anthems Sweet Home Alabama (Lynyrd Skynyrd), The Souths Gonna Do it
Again, and Long-Haired Country Boy (both from the Charlie Daniels Band).26
23
San Franciscos Fillmore West (19651989) and New Yorks Fillmore East (19681971), both
founded by entrepreneur Bill Graham, served as important venues for counter-culture music in the
1960s, hosting The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Grateful Dead, and many other acts, including the
Charles Lloyd Quartet with Keith Jarrett. The Jarrett interview originally aired on the National Public
Radio series Sidran on Record. It was eventually transcribed and published in Ben Sidran, Talking
Jazz: An Oral History, expanded edition (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 284.
24
The Rolling Stones intended their free concert at Altamont on December 6, 1969, as a gift to the people
of San Francisco, and it was supposed to serve as a sort of West Coast version of Woodstock. Instead it became
infamous for the stabbing death of concert goer Meredith Hunter, an eighteenyear-old African American
man, by members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club. The Angels were hired as security for that event.
25
To be sure, there never was a Counterculture in a monolithic sense during the 1960s. Participants
in the Free Speech Movement, Black Panthers, Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society, the
Youth International Party, and other groups each followed their own agendas and codes of conduct. Still,
there is no question that the members of all the various organizations, large and small, shared the belief
that something needed to change in the U.S., and that young people were the most qualified to carry out
that change. For more on both the factionalism that characterized the late 1960s and the dissolution of
many of those groups, see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam,
1987). Whats So Funny was composed and first recorded by Nick Lowe in 1974 with his British pub
rock band, Brinsley Schwartz, on Brinsley Schwartz, The New Favourites of Brinsley Schwartz, United
Artists 29641, 1974, LP. Elvis Costellos more famous version, which Lowe produced, was released in the
U.S. on the LP Armed Forces. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Armed Forces, Columbia 35709, 1979, LP.
26
Neil Young, Southern Man, After the Gold Rush, Reprise 2283, 1970 LP. Neil Young, Alabama,
Harvest, Reprise 2032, 1972, LP. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sweet Home Alabama, Second Helping, MCA 413,
1974, LP. Charlie Daniels Band, The Souths Gonna Do It Again and Long-Haired Country Boy,
Fire on the Mountain, Kama Sutra 2603, 1975, LP.
38
Similar rural/regional sounds were being worked out elsewhere. In the Midwest, the
band Kansas combined progressive rock with American-folk elements, while in
California, Gram Parsons, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and others, fashioned what
became known as country rock. Great Britain nurtured its own version of this trend
through the sounds of Pentangle, early Genesis, and (at times) even Led Zeppelin.27
This is not to say that Keith Jarrett or similarly guided jazz performers and composers
were directly taking their cues from any of the above-named rock groups. Rather, in
post-1960s United States (and Britain and Europe), a rural ideal re-emerged in
popular culture (recall that 1970 saw the first Earth Day celebration, with the
formation of Greenpeace following a year later), and musicians from a number of
regions and genres drew on and helped to configure these understandings in different
ways.
Within this burgeoning green awareness, erstwhile bassist Manfred Eicher
founded ECM Records in 1969.28 ECMs earliest releases from pianists Mal Waldron
and Paul Bley established the label as home to a serious if introspective brand of
jazz. The label soon achieved worldwide acclaim for its unique audiophile sonic
qualities and austere album cover designs. By 1971, Canadas Coda magazine had
hailed the music as the most beautiful sound next to silence, a line the company
still wears with some pride.29 Since its inception, ECM has been home to a diverse
range of jazz and, more recently, new music performers and composers from
throughout the Americas and Europe, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Arvo
Part, Eberhard Weber, Egberto Gismonti, Carla Bley, Jan Garbarek, Jack DeJohnette,
Arild Andersen, Steve Reich, and, for a time, Bill Frisell. Many of these musicians
explored pastoral styles that reflected their own native lands; virtually all of them
received (detractors might say endured) Eichers distinctively spacious sound,
achieved through a liberal dose of studio-induced reverb. Without question,
however, ECMs biggest names during the 1970s and into the 1980s were Keith Jarrett
and guitarist Pat Metheny (born 1954). Of the two, Jarrett remains the musician most
closely associated with the label. He first recorded for ECM in 1971 and continues to
work with that label to this day. In all, he has released roughly sixty recordings
through the company, featuring both improvised music and fully notated scores,
original compositions and covers, all in a broad range of ensemble sizes and
instrumentations.
Romanticism and the American Folk
Keith Jarretts reputation was most firmly established by his series of solo piano
recordings, particularly his Koln Concert (1975), which is reported to have sold over
27
For more on the rise of country rock, see, again, Mather, Cosmic American Music. For more on
Kansas and other folk-infused prog rock, see Mitchell Morris, Kansas and the Prophetic Tone,
American Music 18 (Spring 2000): 138.
28
ECM stands for Edition of Contemporary Music.
29
See the About ECM section from the labels website, at: http://www.ecmrecords.com/About_ECM/
History/index.php?rubchooser5103&mainrubchooser51 (accessed August 10, 2006)
Jazz Perspectives
39
three million copies, a staggering sum for a jazz piano recording.30 Such an
achievement appears even more astonishing given that the record does not really
feature any songs per se, but rather four extended improvised episodes, simply
labeled Part I, Part IIa, Part IIb, and Part IIc. With the vast sweep of musical
territory that Jarrett explores on Koln and his other solo concerts, it would be
inappropriate to pigeonhole him into any particular musical subgenre. Still, it is not
unfair to suggest that his concerts tend to visit fairly discreet musical regions,
including prominent excursions through the pastoral territory that this paper
addresses. Listen, for instance, to the country/gospel-ish feel beginning around 21:15
of Part I, or, for that matter, throughout virtually all of Part IIa.
To be sure, it is easy to hear much of Jarretts solo work as more closely allied with
nineteenth-century European Romanticism than with twentieth-century American
country or folk musics. But if any questions remain that at least portions of Jarretts
solo concerts evoke or emanate from an Americanized rural ideal, Jarrett himself
seems to dispel these in two concert recordings he released in the 1980s. Rather than
labeling each section numerically, as he had done on the Koln Concert, he designated
one portion of his 1981 concert in Bregenz Austria as Heartland. Here he blends
plagal cadences and other harmonic devices seemingly pulled from the Protestant
hymnal with Billy Joel-like singer-songwriter inflections. Similarly, his 1987 Tokyo
concert, released as Dark Intervals, features a segment called Americana. This time,
Jarretts improvisation draws on noble film-score rhetoric of the Hollywood
western, a hint of country rock gestures, and, again, ample plagal cadences. While
distinctions mark each track, both of them seem to stand in apparent homage to
Middle America as the embodiment of humble, quiet dignity.
Beyond these programmatically titled nods to the rural United States, the overall
notion of developmental improvisation, such as Jarrett follows throughout all of
his solo concerts, seems more conducive to evocations of open landscapes than does a
typical bebop-informed jazz performance (an effect that is enhanced, no doubt, by
ECMs aforementioned reverb-soaked sound).
Bebop-type improvisations rarely grow as organically as Jarretts solo work does,
though jazz critics and analysts have often appropriated this formal term from
classical music (as in Gunther Schullers 1958 essay on Sonny Rollinss Blue 7
solo).31 Rather, bop-based musicians generate interest by creative manipulation of
small-scale elements over a repeating 12- or 32-bar song form and a steady pulse. The
regularity of the groove and harmonic cycles generally leads to recurring fluctuations
of tension and release. Recent scholars disagree on the extent to which mid-century
bebop musicians viewed their own music as an overt political statement, Afrocentric
30
Keith Jarrett, The Koln Concert, ECM 810067, 1975, LP. Sales figured quoted from Ian Carr, Digby
Fairweather, Brian Priestly, Jazz: The Rough Guide (London and New York: Rough Guides, Ltd, 1995),
326. For more on Jarretts solo work, see the chapter Body and Soul: Performing Deep Jazz, in Ake,
Jazz Cultures.
31
Gunther Schuller, Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation, in Musings: The
Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 8697. Reprinted from
The Jazz Review, November 1958.
40
or otherwise. Yet it is hard to argue that bops severely angular melodic lines and
often blazing tempos over a regular form represented anything less than a fierce
statement of hip, urbane, assertiveness in the 1940s and 1950s. Black scholar L. D.
Reddick said as much as early as 1949: Bop is essentially modern and urban. It is
the music of sophisticated and modernized individuals and groups.32 For Reddick,
bebop served as a sound of the city at the time, and in many circles these urbanized
understandings continue to this day.33
All of this is a far cry from the gradual unfolding typically found in Jarretts solo
piano work. The fact that Jarrett does not adhere to song forms allows him to alter,
extend, or otherwise develop his ideas without having to adjust to the harmonic,
melodic, and rhythmic constraints of pre-composed material. For some listeners, the
approach feels liberating, empowering, even mystical. For others, the lack of regular
cycles can seem self indulgent and tedious. Regardless of the experience, there is no
question that Jarretts open-ended concerts metaphorically explore wide open
spacesrhythmically, formally, and harmonicallymore fully than do traditional
song form-based jazz performances.34
Outside these solo performances, Jarretts evocations of a rural ideal can also be
heard on portions of his group recordings from the 1970s, most clearly on two highly
acclaimed discs he recorded for ECM: Belonging (1974) and My Song (1977).35
Accompanying Jarrett on both are saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielson,
and drummer Jon Christensen. On Belonging, for example, listen to the loping,
country-style figures that shape Long as You Know Youre Living Yours. Or
consider The Windup, which, in the words of Ian Carr, is inspired by the kind of
boisterous hoedown found in some American square dancing.36 It is no
32
Quoted in Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz: African-American Musicians as Artists, Critics,
and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 90. Originally published as L. D. Reddick,
Dizzy Gillespie in Atlanta, Phylon 10 (first quarter, 1949), 4548.
33
For more on the political debates surrounding early bebop, see Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Blues
People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963; reprint, New York: Quill,
1983); Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997); Eric Lott, Double V, Double-Time: Bebops Politics of Style, in Jazz Among
the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Ingrid Monson, The
Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,
Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (Fall 1995): 396422; and Porter, What Is This Thing.
34
Part IIc of the Koln Concert is an exception. Although the official transcription of that recording
maintains the Part IIc designation, this segment clearly follows a regular song form, and, in fact, a lead
sheet of it appears in The Real Book compilation as Memories of Tomorrow. See Keith Jarrett, The
Koln Concert: Original Transcription (New York: Schott, 1991), 82, and The Real Book, vol. 1, 6th ed. for
all C instruments (New York: Hal Leonard, 2004), 267.
35
Keith Jarrett with Jan Garbarek, Belonging, ECM 829115, 1974, LP. Keith Jarrett Quartet, My Song,
ECM 821406, 1977, LP. Belonging won the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis and Jazz Forums Record of
the Year. Ian Carr heralded both discs as masterpieces in Jazz: The Rough Guide (New York: Penguin,
1995), 325. (Page 385 in the 2nd edition [2005].)
36
Carr, Keith Jarrett, 78. Walter Becker and Donald Fagan of the rock group Steely Dan admitted in an
interview that they used Jarretts Long as You Know Youre Living Yours as the basis for their song
Gaucho. Jarrett eventually sued the group for copyright infringement and is now listed as co-composer
on Gaucho.
Jazz Perspectives
41
coincidence that the title of this last tune refers to the motion of a pitcher in
Americas pastime, baseball.
Another representative of the idyllic in Jarretts quartet work is his composition
Country from the My Song album. Here the mere title of the piece guides
understandings toward a pastoral motif, while the harmonic palette and melodic line,
as well as the performers approach to the song, leave no doubt that we are dealing
with a distinctly North American rural setting. Country is comprised of four 16bar sections, arranged AABB, in the key of E-flat. After a 16-bar solo-piano
introduction, the full quartet enters for the statement of the theme. The songs
harmonic scheme is simple, never straying far from basic I, IV, V, and vi chords,
moving briefly only to the key of A-flat in the B section before quickly working back
to the tonic. The melody is equally straightforward, every note staying within the Eflat-major scale. Jarrett relies predominantly on triadic harmony throughout the
performance, his chord voicings largely eschewing the tension-heightening alterations that typify bop-based piano playing. Rhythmically, the group adheres to a
straight-eighth-note feel, with Danielsson and Christensen providing a steady,
unadorned, foundation. The drummers only concession to a looser, jazz-like,
groove are his occasional punctuations on the and of beat three, whereas a typical
country or pop approach calls for regular snare drum accents on beats two and four.
The musicians retain the original character of the piece for the entire performance.
Aside from the piano introduction, the only solos here are a subdued 32-bar foray by
bassist Danielsson followed by a slightly more assertive, though still melody-driven,
16 bars from Jarrett. This approach serves to support the pastoral feeling pervading
the recording and represents a marked departure from many post-bop performances
since the 1960s in which players engage in long and often highly elaborate improvised
excursions over stark forms. In the final analysis, Country is an unabashedly
pretty song, and that track helped the My Song album achieve an unusual degree of
popular success. The album even cracked the Billboard pop charts in 1978, and it
remains one of the pianists best-known discs.37 Nailing down the musics allure is
tricky, but it may be that it resonated with the new kind of environmentalism among
many listeners of the time: a post Earth Day, post photos-of-the-Earth-from-space
awareness of the fragility of the planet. Jarretts vision here of the American landscape
is not so much one of hearty farm folk toiling in the fields or of awe-inspiring vistas,
but rather a tender homage to a quiet home.
There is a certain irony in the fact that Keith Jarrett is the only participant on this
seemingly all-American album of pastoral jazz to have been born or even reside in the
37
Country resurfaced in 2001, along with other Jarrett recordings, as a theme song of sorts in the
German film Bella Martha (English title: Mostly Martha; Bavaria et al., 2001). One American film
reviewer singled out its use in the soundtrack, describing Country as Keith Jarretts c&w-inflected
ballad (a sprightly, lilting, slightly melancholy piece for a jazz quartet.) Given the critics mention of
C&Wcountry and westernit is quite clear, and more than a little remarkable, that the song retains
a rural-American flavor, even in a German-language film about a widowed chef set in Hamburg. See
Michael Wilmington, Review of Mostly Martha, at http://www.zap2it.com/movies/movies/reviews/text/
0,1259,-13454,00.html (accessed August 10, 2006).
42
United States. Besides the pianist, the recording was the work of two Norwegians
(Garbarek and Christensen) and a Swede (Danielssen). The session was recorded in
Oslo by a pair of Germanssound engineer Jan-Erik Kongshaug and producer
Manfred Eicher. Such a revelation marks an appropriate place to confess that I
originally planned to call this paper The Emergence of the Rural Ideal in American
Jazz. I substituted the present title when I realized that it is one thing to say that the
music discussed here in some ways points to or derives from a rural Americanness. But it is quite another to designate this group as American jazz. This
observation is extremely relevant, given the location where the music was recorded,
the label that released the album, and the range of nationalities of the participants. Be
that as it may, Jarretts ECM recordings in the 1970s should be seen as a significant
influence on the subsequent development of the rural American ideal in jazz, as well
as, in a curious twist, on a range of regional subgenres from throughout the globe. In
showing musicians that one could play something called jazz in the 1970s without
having to sound like (or be) a New York-based hard-bop or free-jazz stylist, Jarretts
popular and commercial successes on ECM made it more acceptable for players and
composers everywhere to explore their own local sounds, grooves, and aesthetics. In
this way, Jarrett and his label helped to accelerate and legitimate the emergence of
what has been called variously European jazz, Euro jazz, World jazz, even
glocalized jazz, a phenomena that go somewhat beyond the scope of this paper.38
Jarrett never seems to vie for authentic renditions of gospel, folk, or country in his
performances. His playing is often too dense harmonically, and his virtuosic and
clear-toned style does not suit the rough-and-ready elements of these more
vernacular idioms. Still, his borrowings from and signifyin on these other music
cultures is unmistakable. Moreover, we should recognize that the rural imagery that
emerges from Jarretts ECM recordings is grounded firmly in European-American
notions of the great outdoors. Jarrett did suggest Native American lore on his
Yaqui Indian Song (The Impulse Years, 1997), Great Bird (Death and the Flower,
1974), Sundance (Expectations, 1971), and De Drums (Fort Yawuh, 1973). But
he recorded these compositions with different sidemen on different labels (Columbia
or Impulse!), and they never achieved the commercial success of the ECM discs, nor
have they seemed to inspire many other performers or composers to develop their
38
For a discussion of glocalization, see Stuart Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead (Or Has It Moved to a New
Address)? (New York: Routledge, 2005). Elsewhere in that book, Nicholson interviews British
saxophonist Iain Ballamy, who said: My first few years as a player were spent learning and absorbing
the music of the American jazz masters, but the biggest personal revelation for me was the discovery of
the music typified by the ECM label, especially albums like My Song with Jan Garbarek and Keith Jarrett
This musicnon-blues based, lyrical, and occasionally folkyseemed to resonate more strongly with
me, being a European. It came to me at the time I was beginning to write my own material and very
quickly discovered that playing ones own tunes in a way that felt right as an Englishman, rather than in
an appropriated genre from another place and time, felt natural and right for me. (174; Nicholson does
not cite the original source of the quote.) See also the mention of Keith Jarrett by Swedish pianist
Esbjorn Svensson in Christopher Porter, Taking Five with E.S.T., JazzTimes 36 (February 2006),
36. For more on European jazz, see David Ake Negotiating Style, Nation, and Identity among
American Jazz Musicians in Paris, Journal for Musicological Research 23 (AprilJune, 2004): 15986.
Jazz Perspectives
43
own Native-Americanist, rural-oriented approaches.39 Among the legion who picked

up on Jarretts Euro-American rural aesthetic was Pat Metheny, perhaps the singlemost important musician in shaping Americanized pastoral jazz, and so the focus of
the remainder of this paper.
New American Guitar Hero

It is no coincidence that Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell, two of the more prominent
presences in this essay, are guitarists. The guitar is the only instrument that regularly
serves a front-line role in folk, blues, country, rock, and jazz, so guitarists are more
readily able to move among and incorporate elements of each of these genres.40
Though three years younger than Frisell, Metheny received the earliest widespread
attention of the two, and he has sustained a remarkable level of commercial and
critical success since his 1974 debut on ECM as a twenty-year old sideman for
vibraphonist Gary Burton.41 Burton himself had explored American pastoral-jazz
idioms in the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably on his albums Tennessee Firebird
(1966) (which featured both Chet Atkins and Roy Haynes!) and Country Roads
(1969), as well as his recorded collaboration with Keith Jarrett (1971).42
Undoubtedly, Methenys entrance into Burtons group was based in part on these
musicians shared interest in a pastoral-jazz aesthetic.
Pat Metheny was raised in the Kansas City suburb of Lees Summit, Missouri.
Interviews reveal that he was a devoted Beatles fan until he experienced a jazz
epiphany at twelve years old when he heard his older brothers copy of Miles Daviss
Four and More album. From that point, the guitarist jumped headlong into his
adopted genre, listening, practicing, and gigging extensively. After high school, he
headed to the University of Miami where he studied for one semester before being
asked to teach. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Boston, becoming the youngest
instructor ever at the Berklee College of Music. It was during this period that he
joined Burtons group. While he readily absorbed the sounds of his new East Coast
surroundings, he never left his Midwest roots entirely behind. In fact, the opposite is
true. For, as DownBeat contributor Neil Tesser noted as early as 1979, Methenys
music springs directly from the American heartland in which he grew up.43
39
Keith Jarrett, The Impulse Years, 19731974, Impulse! 237, 1997, compact disc. Keith Jarrett Quintet,
Death and the Flower, Impulse ASD 9301, 1974, LP. Keith Jarrett, Expectations, Columbia KG 31580,
1971, LP. Keith Jarrett, Fort Yawuh, Impulse! AS 9240, 1973, LP. Fort Yawuh peaked at 36 on the
Billboard Jazz chart. Ironically, one ECM musician who did record a Native American-inspired tune was
Jarretts Norwegian sideman, Jan Garbarek, with Witchi-Tai-To, composed by the saxophonist Jim
Pepper, a member of the Kaw Indian nation. Jan Garbarek with Bobo Stenson, Witchi-Tai-To, ECM
833330, 1974, LP.
40
Bass and drums can also play an important function in all of these genres, of course, but they typically
appear in more supporting roles.
41
Metheny first recorded as a sideman for the label on Ring led by Gary Burton and Eberhard Weber.
The Gary Burton Quintet with Eberhard Weber, Ring, ECM 1051, 1974, LP.
42
Gary Burton, Tennessee Firebird RCA LSP3719, 1966, LP; Gary Burton, Country Roads RCA SF8042,
1969, LP; Gary Burton and Keith Jarrett, Atlantic SD1677, 1971, LP.
43
Neil Tesser, Pat Metheny: Fresh Face of Fusion, DownBeat, March 22, 1979, 12.
44
Metheny recorded ten albums for ECM as a leader between 1976 and 1985 before
moving on to an affiliation with Geffen Records. Like Keith Jarretts work for ECM,
the guitarists output on that label showcases a variety of instrumental combinations.
Despite the broad diversity of performing forces, however, at least eight of these
records include overt references (via song titles and photos) to rural settings, nature,
Americana in general, or parts of the Midwest in particular. (See Table 1.) His
compositional style and performances of those works cemented his central role as a
pastoral jazz proponent at that time. Metheny remarks even to this day of Jarretts
enormous influence on his music.44 Still, the guitarist found his own path, and his
Americanized pastoral jazz manifests itself in a number of different ways, shaped in
large measure by the performance setting in which he places himself. These variations
do not merely reflect different musical approaches to the same idea, but configure
differing notions of the United States beyond its cities limits.
Daybreak
In 1979, ECM released New Chautauqua, a one-man album featuring Metheny on a
variety of guitars. The records title references the Chautauqua Movement that, from
the 1870s to the 1920s, sought to provide Americans in the hinterland with religious,
artistic, intellectual, scientific, and political food for thought.45 In keeping with the
rural setting of the original movement, the cover photo of the New Chautauqua
record depicts an empty stretch of highway flanked on one side by a grove of trees, on
the other by a swath of green field. Superimposed above the scene in a photographic
negative is a small shot of Metheny holding a guitar in what appears to be a
performance venue or recording studio. The verdant foliage and the open
thoroughfare lend an air of the idyllic we have discussed, yet the ghostly image of
the musician floating over the highway could lead viewers to interpret this, not as a
pastoral setting, but rather as a road record, a product of the guitarists
peripatetic lifestyle. Metheny played roughly 300 dates a year during this time, the
long string of gigs broken up only by even longer stretches in the tour bus. All of this
44
Methenys website features the guitarists answers to fans questions. His responses include such
statements as I feel that Keith [Jarrett] is one of the greatest composers of our time, and I wish his music
was played moreit offers something really special that you just cant find anywhere else, and there are
not a lot of contemporary jazz composers you can say that about. Metheny also remarks that Keith is
one of my all time favorite musicianshe is certainly one of the most important living musicians. There
is so much to say about Keiths greatness, I wouldnt even know where to begin. I cant really think of
anyone whose talent compares to his. Select the keyword Jarrett at http://www.patmethenygroup.
com/pmg/qa/questionselect.cfm (accessed August 10, 2006).
45
Pat Metheny, New Chatauqua, ECM 1131, 1979, LP. Considered one of the earliest instances of
adult education in the United States, the Movements name comes from the location of the groups
headquarters at Lake Chautauqua, New York. The center there served as the home to an annual eightweek series of courses and lectures. The series eventually became mobile, as tent-show chautauquas
brought speakers to communities throughout the nation. Participants included Mark Twain, William
Jennings Bryan, and a number of American presidents.
Jazz Perspectives
45
Table 1 Sample of Pat Metheny composition titles from his ECM recordings.
ECM Album Title (Year)
Song Title(s)
Personnel (Instrument)
Bright Size Life (1976)
Missouri Uncompromised
Midwestern Nights Dream
Omaha Celebration
Lakes
Metheny (electric guitar)

Jaco Pastorius (electric bass)
Bob Moses (drums)
Lyle Mays (piano)
Eberhard Weber (bass)
Danny Gottlieb (drums)
Mays (piano, synthesizer, autoharp)
Mark Egan (electric bass)
Gottlieb (drums)
Metheny (electric and acoustic guitars,
electric bass)
Watercolors (1977)
Pat Metheny Group (1978) April Wind
New Chautauqua (1979)
Country Poem
American Garage (1980)
Daybreak
(Cross the) Heartland
Airstream
80/81 (1980)
Two Folk Songs
As Falls Wichita, So Falls

Wichita Falls (1981)
As Falls Wichita, So Falls

Wichita Falls
Ozark
Travels (1983)
The Fields, The Sky

Farmers Trust

Mays (piano, synthesizer, autoharp,
organ)
Egan (electric bass)
Gottlieb (drums)
Metheny (electric and acoustic guitar)
Michael Brecker (tenor sax)
Dewey Redman (tenor sax)
Charlie Haden (bass)
Jack DeJohnette (drums)
Metheny (electric guitar, electric bass)
Mays (keys)
Nana Vasconcelos (percussion)
Mays (keys)
Vasconcelos (percussion)
Gottlieb (drums)
Steve Rodby (electric and acoustic
bass)
was memorialized in 1983 by a live double-album from the Pat Metheny Group
called, appropriately, Travels.46
The back-cover photo of the New Chautauqua album immediately settles any
ambiguity regarding the records open-spaces look. Here we see a much clearer image
of Metheny. Instead of capturing him at work (as on the front), this photo presents
him posed casually on a wooden stool. Bathed in sunlight streaming through a
window, Methenys tousled mane of hair haloes his smiling face. Again, he holds a
guitar, but unlike the indistinct front-cover image, we can readily recognize this as a
steel-stringed acoustic guitar. Such an instrument has long remained the preferred
choice for performers of country, folk, and other rural-American music idioms, but
has held virtually no place at all in modern jazz. To complete the scene, Metheny is
46
Pat Metheny Group, Travels, ECM 23791, 1983, LP.
46
Figure 2 Front album cover photo to Pat Metheny, New Chautauqua (1979). Image
courtesy of ECM Records.
barefooted and dressed in attire typical of Middle American youth of the time: a
cotton T-shirt with stenciled logo (obstructed by the guitar) and faded blue jeans
Levis or possibly Wranglers (certainly not Sergio Valenti, Calvin Klein, or any of the
other designer versions of jeans favored by fans of disco music and other urban
genres in the 1970s) (see Figures 2 and 3). The overall impression here is youthful and
genial, and also unmistakably white. This presentation is a striking contrast to the
images of serious African American men that the jazz world had witnessed on record
covers and fan magazines since the middle 1940s (or would see again a decade later
with Wynton Marsalis and his Armani-clad cohort). The guitarists laid-back
demeanor even differs from the sub-Saharan dashikis or Arabic galabayas that some
players, black and white (including Keith Jarrett), adopted in the middle 1960s and
into the 1970s as a sign of solidarity with the increasingly visible Civil Rights
movement and anti-Establishment values.47
New Chautauquas down-home visual imagery finds a clear aural equivalent in the
records compositions and performances. The title cut commences with alternating
47
Carr, Keith Jarrett, 32.
Jazz Perspectives
47
Figure 3 Back album cover photo to Pat Metheny, New Chautauqua (1979)). Image
courtesy of ECM Records.
triads of B and A over a tonic E pedal vigorously strummed with a flat pick on the
acoustic guitar. Methenys choice of E as the tonic key maximizes his use of open
strings, and this, combined with the strumming technique, reinforces the connections
to country and folk styles. The song retains this flavor even after Metheny enters with
the songs theme, which he has overdubbed using an electric hollow-body guitar,
modified by electronic effects. This added timbre would not be out of place in a jazzrock fusion setting of the time (it was his preferred sound with the Pat Metheny
Group), yet the acoustic guitar underpinnings, the strummed straight-eighth-note
rhythm, and triadic harmony virtually guarantee that we will hear New
Chautauqua as a type of rural-based music.
The extended explorations of Long-Ago Child/Fallen Star carry the album
briefly toward modernist timbral and rhythmic directions, but the pastoral feeling
pervades the entire rest of the disc. Listen, for example, to Country Poem, the
jangle-y finger picking of which would have sounded more idiomatically at home as a
sonic backdrop to Ken Burnss The Civil War documentary (Florentine Films et al.,
48
1990) a decade later than to that filmmakers Jazz series of 2000 (Florentine Films
et al., 2001). Even at the time of the albums release, jazz critic Larry Birnbaum
recognized (and seemed uncomfortable with) the racial implications of the musics
rural qualities, writing that with [this recordings] churchy bluegrass and neoRomantic sensibilities, Metheny has fashioned a cleanly orchestrated rhapsody in
white, bearing none but the most tangential relationship to Afro-American
traditions.48
New Chautauqua draws so much on country and bluegrass practices that it is
difficult to see and hear how this record comes to be defined as jazz at all. Perhaps
it is because Metheny, young as he was, had already established himself in that genre
with his work alongside Gary Burton. Or maybe it is that ECM was known at that
time as a jazz label, so anything distributed under that brand would be placed
automatically in the jazz bins of record stores. (New Chautauqua was released before
the advent of ECMs New Series recordings of contemporary music by John
Adams, Arvo Part, and others.) Or perhaps, as teachers of undergraduate jazz history
courses for non-music majors will attest, this recording was considered jazz
because so many people consider jazz to be any instrumental music that is not
classical.49 Whatever the cause or causes, Pat Metheny presented a strikingly
different look and sound for the genre. Even more than Keith Jarretts work,
Methenys New Chautauqua album signaled a profound shift in how the music could
be practiced and understood from that point forward. For suddenly, the popularly
held meanings associated with blue jeans and the strummed steel-string acoustic
guitarnamely, white Middle Americawere no longer antithetical to jazz; for those
many musicians and listeners invested in Pat Methenys presentation, they
represented, if not the only style of jazz, at least a viable and engaging subgenre of it.
While New Chautauqua serves as an unambiguous example of an American idyllic
strain in jazz during the 1970s, in one way it is somewhat of an anomaly in Methenys
oeuvre. For unlike Jarrett, who has devoted much of his career to solo concerts and
recordings, Pat Metheny has spent most of his time working alongside a host of other
musicians. Of these, it is worth discussing two individuals in particular: keyboardist
Lyle Mays and bassist Charlie Haden (a former Keith Jarrett sideman). Both of these
musicians played central roles in helping Metheny configure differing inflections of
the pastoral jazz theme.50
48
Larry Birnbaum, Record Reviews: Pat Metheny, New Chautauqua, DownBeat, September 6, 1979,
36.
49
Much the same question about genre could be posed regarding Frisells Nashville release. Scholars
Scott DeVeaux and Krin Gabbard have produced important work on this topic. Still, the area remains
open for further research. See Scott DeVeaux, Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,
Black American Literature Forum 25 (Fall 1991): 52560, and Krin Gabbard, Introduction: The Jazz
Canon and Its Consequences, in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1995). Also relevant are my essays Jazz Historiography and the Problem of Louis
Jordan and the previously cited Jazz Traditioning, both in Ake, Jazz Cultures.
50
Metheny did return to the solo-acoustic format with One Quiet Night, released by Warner Brothers in
2003 (Warner Bros. 48473, compact disc). On this set, Metheny covers Norah Joness Dont Know
Why and Jarretts My Song.
Jazz Perspectives
49
Charlie Haden was born in Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1937, but spent the majority of
his formative years in Springfield, Missouri. As a child, he soaked up the sounds of
hillbilly and white gospel music while singing and playing ukulele as part of The
Haden Family Singers radio show. Haden recounted those early years in a 1984
interview with writer Rafi Zabor:
I saw a special view of country America that you dont get in the city. I used to go
to houses in rural Missouri and people would be on their porches singing and
playing fiddles and blowing into moonshine jugs, playing washboards and spoons.
My grandpa used to play the fiddle under his chest instead of his chin and he used
to tell me stories about Frank and Jesse James, the Younger Brothers and the
Daltons. My grandma told me about Wild Bill Hickok in Springfield, Missouri.51
Like Metheny, Haden became aware of jazz as a teen through an older brother. After
taking up bass (another of his brothers influences), he moved to Los Angeles in 1956,
and soon met and began working with Ornette Coleman. To many musicians, critics,
and listeners of the time, Coleman seemed like an iconoclast whose music was either
deliberately intended to shock or was a disturbing product of an anxious Cold War
era.52 Yet Haden heard the saxophonist differently. In Coleman, Haden found a
kindred spirit, one who, like himself, combined a thorough understanding of bebops
modernist principles with a deep knowledge ofand love forrural American music
traditions. The clearest illustration of their shared aesthetic can be heard on
Ramblin, from Colemans Change of the Century album recorded in 1959.53 On
this cut, Hadens bass solo consists almost entirely of playing the melody of the
traditional song Old Joe Clark.
Haden reexamined that same melody two decades later as the second tune of a
quasi-medley called Two Folk Songs, which was positioned as the opening track of
Methenys 80/81 (recorded in Oslo, May 1980).54 The Old Joe Clark segment of
this track will be discussed in more detail below, but it bears noting here that the first
of the folk tunes on this pairing was not a long-established staple of musical
Americana, a` la Joe Clark, but rather an original composition by Metheny. That is,
similar to Bob Dylans work during the folk-revivalist days in the early 1960s,
Metheny composed his own take on timeless classics. And like so many other
recompositions of folk music tune models and idioms, Methenys composition forges
an idealized vision of rural life as unadorned and unpretentious. For his Folk Song
#1 (as it was titled later in its published form), he uses a sparse harmonic
progression of D, C, G, and A triads.55 His melody, based on short, hummable, threeand four-note motives, outlines a D mixolydian mode. The song follows an irregular
51
Rafi Zabor, Charlie Haden, Liberation and Revelation: The Probing Essence of the Bass, Musician
66 (April 1984), 44.
52
For more responses to Coleman, see John Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life (New York:
Morrow, 1992), and Peter Niklas Wilson, Ornette Coleman: His Life and Music (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills
Books, 1999).
53
Ornette Coleman, Change of the Century, Atlantic SD-1327, 1960, LP.
54
Pat Metheny, 80/81, ECM 815579, 1980, LP.
55
Pat Metheny Songbook (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, n. d. but ca. 2000).
50
variation of a standard AABA form: the standard 8-bar B section is framed by 11-bar
A sections, each of which features one bar in 5/4 meter, with the others in the more
typical 4/4. Presumably, Metheny chose these slight irregularities to approximate the
looseness of Depression-era Southern vernacular styles. Of course, Folk Song #1
differs markedly from the unpolished work of, say, Jimmie Rodgers blue yodels, or
Robert Johnsons Delta blues. In specific, Metheny composed the uneven phrase
length and maintains it in every A section, while Rodgers, Johnson, and similar
musicians tailored their phrasing to the circumstances of each iteration. As published
in the Metheny Songbook, the resulting composition looks like what it is: a clever
representation of musical Americana.
As with all orally/aurally-based genres, however, that which appears rather dull on
the printed page can come to life in performance. At nearly twenty-one minutes long,
Two Folk Songs stands as one of the more fascinating jazz recordings of the 1980s.
Alongside Metheny and Haden on this track are saxophonist Michael Brecker and
drummer Jack DeJohnette. The musicians play the complete form of the composition
only twicebefore and after Breckers tenor solo, the stated chords for which consist
merely of a repeated two-bar cycle: D triad for one bar, C triad for two beats, and G/B
and G/A for one beat eachall in 4/4 time.
Methenys decision to pare down the solo sections to these few simple chord
changes, rather than to require the musicians to negotiate the unusual structure of
the songs A sections, clearly freed these players to stretch out. In particular, Brecker
foregoes tried-and-true devices. At the time of this recording, that saxophonists
reputation rested mainly on his position as co-leader of The Brecker Brothers, a funk
and fusion group, as well as his work as a top-tier session player. In those situations,
he demonstrated dazzling virtuosity and harmonic sophistication, while proving
himself a dependable font of concise, clean, and soulful passages. He could easily
have turned to such techniques here. Yet on Folk Songs, he steers clear of his
trademark licks, and focuses instead on vocal-like gestures reminiscent of African
American New Thing artists of the 1960s, such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah
Sanders.
Mention must be made of the stunning interaction among the rhythm section
players. As on New Chautauqua, Metheny opens Folk Songs with strummed
steel-stringed acoustic guitar. Again, prior to Methenys emergence, this technique
had been unknown in jazz contexts. Yet here, the timbre sounds absolutely
appropriate given the bare harmonic progression and Hadens characteristically
unadorned bass lines. In a 1982 interview, Metheny said of the track, I was thinking
in terms of c&w [country and western]. He further noted that the tune came
from an idea I had to get that real energetic strumming thing happening as a
rhythmic element for Jack [DeJohnette] and Charlie [Haden] to play against.56
Methenys accompanimental approach here certainly invigorates DeJohnette, whose
loose, kinetic drumming feels at times as if it will overwhelm the rest of the band, but
somehow remains under control and supportive. His drum solo (beginning around
56
Tim Schneckloth, Pat Metheny: A Step Beyond Tradition, DownBeat, November 1982, 16.
Jazz Perspectives
51
the 10:20 mark) serves as a transition to Old Joe Clark, the second half of the
pairing (which begins 13:18). Hadens austere statement of that songs melody leads
the group toward a majestic march-like section for Methenys acoustic guitar solo
heading into a long, gradual diminuendo (perhaps a board fade) as Haden returns
with the songs theme.57
In other hands, Two Folk Songs could have come off as a trite nod to an
imagined rural utopian past. Thanks in large part to the contributions of Brecker,
Haden, and DeJohnette, the recording never feels like an attempt to re-create pastoral
days gone by. Instead, these players succeed in shaping their own vision by mediating
the two seemingly diametrically opposed worlds of modernist jazz and rural white
folk stylings. As noted, the Ornette Coleman Quartet had suggested such a
connection with Ramblin in the late 1950s. But this Two Folk Songs
performance goes beyond a mere reiteration of Old Joe Clark, enabling us to
hear Colemans 1959 cut in an entirely new way. By echoing that portion of
Ramblin, Metheny and his colleagues remind us that Coleman was not simply
playing at the cutting edge of the modernist avant garde, but rather he was also
simultaneously working through and giving voice to the deep, interwoven, and varied
rural roots of his (and also Hadens) musical upbringing.
Of 80/81s seven other selections, only The Bat, Every Day (I Thank You), and
Goin Ahead draw directly on pastoral jazz timbres and harmonies (with the solo
guitar performance of the latter song returning us to the terrain of New Chautauqua,
by utilizing a gently finger-picked acoustic guitar and triadic harmony). But these
cuts, when placed alongside Turnaround (an Ornette Coleman-composed blues
head), Open, and Pretty Scattered, further contextualize and reinforce the
country/avant-garde associations laid down in Two Folk Songs.58 Both Open
and Pretty Scared feature saxophonist Dewey Redman, who, like Haden, was a
former sideman for both Coleman and Keith Jarrett. Significantly, Redman and
DeJohnette are the only two African American musicians on this album. Given the
strong rural-folk flavor of the record, the mere presence on these two men on the
57
The term board fade refers to a diminuendo that is controlled more by a sound engineer at the
mixing board (via volume faders) than by the musicians themselves.
58
Critic Gary Giddins has suggested that Methenys music from the 80/81 era was an attempted
syncretism of Keith Jarrett and Ornette Coleman. See Giddinss Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and
Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 56. The implied connection among Coleman,
Haden, Metheny, and DeJohnette became literal in 1986 when they all recorded Song X. Pat Metheny
and Ornette Coleman, Song X, Geffen-24096, 1991, compact disc. However, at the time of those later
sessions, the musicians seemed less interested in reexamining their shared interests in rural traditions and
more concerned with exploring the new sonic possibilities afforded by the emerging digital technology,
including Methenys Synclavier synthesizer and the electric drums played by the records other
percussionist, Denardo Coleman. In many ways, as a new kind of dense, angular, and loud electric
jazz, Song X serves as the antithesis to 80/81s bucolic vision. Though Song X marks the only time that
Metheny recorded with Ornette Coleman, the guitarist has continued to play with both DeJohnette and,
more frequently, with Haden. Of particular relevance to this essay is Metheny and Hadens 1997 CD
Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) (Verve 537130), the cover of which, in an apparent homage to the
musicians shared Show-Me State roots, features a photograph of a farmhouse draped by the pastel hues
of the heavens suggested in the albums title.
52
records inside cover photo destabilizes essentialized understandings of racial and

musical identity. By the time of this albums release, popular conceptions of the geocultural configuration of the United States had all but ossified into a rural 5 white,
city 5 black polarity.59 The inspired performances from Dewey Redman and Jack
DeJohnette, as well as those of the other participants here, disrupt such a binary,
recalling in many ways the close interaction of black and white vernacular musicians
in pre-Great Migration Americawhat Greil Marcus has called the old, weird
Americawhere hillbilly, blues, folk, and jazz overlapped to a great
degree.60 In these ways, 80/81 encourages us to hear the rural United States, not as a
carefree, timeless, and exclusively white domain, but rather as a multifaceted,
unpredictable, ever-evolving, and occasionally beautifully tempestuous land.61
Garage Band
I feel myself leaning all the time toward rocknot rock, exactlybut a more
American influence, all the time.
Pat Metheny (1978)62
Lyle Mays, another Midwesterner (born 1952 in Wausau, Wisconsin) has served as
keyboardist and co-composer for the Pat Metheny Group since that ensembles
inception in the mid-1970s. Early on, Mays evinced an atypical jazz keyboard style.
Unlike the soloistic synthesizer playing of Jan Hammer, Herbie Hancock, Chick
Corea, and the other fusion proponents that preceded him, Mays predominantly
employs a warm timbre and sustained pads. Likewise, in his piano playing, Mays
rarely displays much of a bebop-inflected linear conception (here he differs from
Metheny, who can run changes with the best of them). Instead, his playing reveals
the unmistakable influence of Keith Jarretts American-pastoral-sounding work,
particularly in the way Mays emulates Jarretts propensity for triadic and add 2
voicings. To further cement the connection to Keith Jarrett, Mays and Metheny
performed Jarretts composition The Wind Up in their Groups live sets during the
1970s and early 1980s. In addition to the synthesizers and piano, Lyle Mays may be
the only jazz musician to have made the autoharp a permanent part of his
performance arsenal. Although used sparingly, that instruments shimmering
59
This generalization is strongly supported by contemporary country/urban stereotypes on American

television in the 1970s. On the one hand, think of the television shows Green Acres or Petticoat Junction;
on the other, recall The Jeffersons, Good Times, or the fact that the radio industrys urban format
designation referred almost exclusively to black artists.
60
Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America, in Invisible Republic: Bob Dylans Basement Tapes (New
York: Henry Holt, 1997), 87126.
61
With regard to the blurring of Southern musical and cultural boundaries in the first decades of the
twentieth century, Harry Smith (editor of the folk revivalists bible, the Folkways boxed record set
Anthology of American Folk Music), recalled that it took years before anybody discovered that [African
American guitarist] Mississippi John Hurt wasnt a hillbilly. Quoted in Marcus, Invisible Republic, 104.
62
John Alan Simon, Pat Metheny: Ready to Tackle Tomorrow, DownBeat 45, July 13, 1978, 23.
Jazz Perspectives
53
resonance blends well with Methenys guitar timbres and helped fortify the Groups
rural idyllic passages.
The Pat Metheny Group released five albums for ECM between 1978 and 1985. Of
these, their eponymous first record (sometimes known as The White Album) is
probably best known today. While that record features distinct pastoral jazz elements
(especially in Phase Dance, Aprilwind, and April Joys), these traits are
decidedly more pronounced on the Groups highly successful follow-up, American
Garage.63 Mays and Metheny collaborated as co-composers for four of the five
compositions on Garage, and their work together on this record represents a
markedly different take on the pastoral theme from that heard on the discs previously
discussed. For while American Garage definitely points away from the crowded
downtowns of the United States, it does not settle comfortably within either the
gentle acoustic confines of New Chautauqua or the fierce folk/blues/free-jazz
crossroads of 80/81.
The cover photo of American Garage features a grassy lot filled with postwar era
campers, the vehicles aluminum bodies glittering in the sun. Overhead, a gentle bank
of puffy white clouds frames an otherwise clear blue sky. Given popular
understandings in the United States of campers as the preferred mode of travel for
retirees and mild-mannered weekend vacationers, the use of this setting on the cover
of a jazz record is worth noting. Perhaps we are meant to understand the image as an
ironic critique of a tired and timid Middle America. If so, that message is lost, as
nothing in this placid setting suggests anything but a sincere homage to this area of
public life. (See Figure 4.)
The photo on the back of the record sleeve further helps to locate this recording,
both culturally and geographically. This shot depicts the Group apparently in
rehearsal. Rather than offering a glimpse of the quartet behind the scenes during an
actual session, we find a staged portrait of the musicians playing next to an old
station wagon in the garage of the albums title. Note Lyle Mayss placement in the
shot. In lieu of the usual array of instruments Mays used in the Groups live shows,
we see only one humble electronic piano, with an amp serving as a stand. On top of
that keyboard sits a well-worn baseball glove with ball visible inside, as if Mays had
just come from a baseball diamond. (See Figure 5.)
Of course, the point of this photograph is not for us literally to consider Lyle Mays
or any of the other members of the band as dedicated baseball players. Rather, the
presence of this particular piece of sports equipment (i.e., a mitt, and not, say, a
rugby jersey) encourages perceptions of these four young, slightly shaggy men as the
newest incarnation of that gloriously all-American laboratory of post-War dreams:
the garage band. We are to believe that these young, white maleswho in a slightly
earlier time would have covered the songs, sounds, and moves of rock n rollare
dreaming of jazz stardom. Like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and John Lennon in the
1950s and 1960s, the garage-band ideal is embodied in this group by the guitarist, Pat
63
Pat Metheny Group, Pat Metheny Group (ECM 1114, 1978, LP) and American Garage (ECM 1115,
1979, LP).
54
Figure 4 Front album cover photo to Pat Metheny, Pat Metheny Group, American
Garage (1980). Image courtesy of ECM Records.
Metheny, who, while not the front-most musician in the image, plainly stands out as
the leader here.
The visual garage-band motif finds its most clear sonic counterpart in the
introduction of the albums title song. Drummer Danny Gottlieb slashes out four
measures of quarter notes on the half-open high-hat cymbals. This is followed by one
of the band members counting off in typically exuberant rock n roll fashionOne.
Two. One, Two, Three, Four! It is an intriguing gesture for a jazz album, one that
offers possibilities for a new kind of rock n roll/jazz fusion, perhaps a punk jazz.64
Yet, after an energetic enough opening section, the tune quickly falls into a restrained
melody over a light funk groove in G major. This texture is followed by a harmonic
progression that utilizes A-flat major seventh and G-flat major seventh chords,
sonorities that are considered jazzy in rock n roll culture. The momentum does
64
In fact, Methenys friend and former colleague, electric bassist Jaco Pastorius, had adopted that very
term to describe his own sound. Given Pastoriouss career and life paths, the label seems apt. See Bill
Milkowski, Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius, The Worlds Greatest Bass Player
(San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 1995).
Jazz Perspectives
55
Figure 5 Back album cover photo to Pat Metheny Group, American Garage (1980).
Image courtesy of ECM Records.
pick up again during Methenys impressive guitar solowhich features a brief nod to
the Beatles Get Backbut the preceding sections had already tamed the track.65
Any connections from the songs name and opening count-off to 1970s garage-band
rock aestheticswhich valued transgressive energy and looseness above allis
undermined by the Groups clean and well-ordered rendition.
The title track is not the only innocuous performance on American Garage. Far
from the unguarded avant-folk abandon of 80/81, the entire record blithely celebrates
a safe and hospitable jazz soundscape, as far removed from a hardened dustbowl
terrain as it is from a smoky urban nightclub. The Mays/Metheny tune Airstream,
named after the well-known brand of trailers, sounds like nothing less than a benign
tribute to the gently nomadic lifestyle of the tourists who inhabit the vehicles pictured
on the album cover. Every moment of American Garagefrom the jangling
Hollywood-western, Copland-esque open-fifths-and-octaves introduction of (Cross
the) Heartland to the multi-sectional grandeur of The Epicseems to affirm a
decidedly Middle-American brand of optimism.
To jazz listeners today, American Garages earnestness may feel forced and
overblown, much like the highly orchestrated festivities that surrounded the 1976
commemoration of the nations Bicentennial a few years before the records release.
Still, this album must certainly have sounded refreshing for many at that time. How
65
The Beatles, Get Back, Let It Be, Parlophone/Capitol 46447, 1970, LP.
56
else to explain the fact that Garage topped Billboard magazines jazz charts in 1980?66
Given its success, the albums importance, then and since, should not be
underestimated, for here we see evidence of a consequential shift in jazzs literal
and figurative place in the United States.
I mentioned at the outset that the traditional narrative of jazz history holds that the
music traveled from city to city. I have also noted a few examples of a deeply rural
strain that emerged during the 1970s and after. But in American Garage and the many
similar efforts it inspired, we find jazz tracing a third path, one right next door to the
musics traditional centers yet at the same time safely removed from those locations.
These records announce a metaphorical migration for at least one segment of jazz
and its audiences, a migration that echoes the actual movement of large portions of
American society after World War II: the exodus to suburbia. Like its correlate
among the general population of the United States, this phenomenon is a decidedly
white flight from the city.
It is worth recalling that the 1970s witnessed a particularly troubled period for U.S.
cities, illustrated most clearly by the infamous October 30, 1975, New York Daily
News headline: Ford to City: Drop Dead.67 The urban troubles of this era are also
readily reflected in the many photographic and video images of Los Angeles engulfed
by smog, or stories of Clevelands Cuyahoga River catching fire. It is no surprise that
many Americans at that time, of all ages and backgrounds, placed their hopes and
dreams somewhere other than the nations urban centers.
Even some New York-based jazz musicians began to question their living
situations. Those so inclined and who could afford to leave The Appleincluding
both Metheny and Jarrettheaded to smaller towns in upstate New York or in
Pennsylvania or New Jersey.68 Those jazz musicians who stuck it out in the boroughs
of New York City faced an increasingly difficult work situation, as clubs closed or
presented other forms of music. Some of these players, like the saxophonist Sam
Rivers, began producing their own shows in New Yorks former warehouse spaces.
The loft scene that emerged gave voice to the eras many anxieties, producing an
edgy, free jazz-inspired, sound, with a decidedly Afrocentric orientation.
66
Not all jazz critics were appreciative of American Garages secure terrain. Elaine Guregian lamented
that by relieving their audience of effort, Metheny and Mays also deprive us of the pleasure of surprise
and the possibility of inspiration. She concludes, Metheny fans may be satisfied with this sleek effort
but I dont think they should be. It is a shame for Metheny and the rest of the group to waste so much
talent on artifice. Record Reviews: Pat Metheny Group, American Garage, DownBeat, April, 1980,
42.
67
With New York City facing possible bankruptcy in the middle 1970s, Mayor Abraham Beame
requested bail-out funds from the federal government. The headline in the Daily News paraphrased
Fords negative response.
68
Both Jarrett and Metheny were among those who decided to forego city living, with Metheny settling
for a time in Woodstock, New York, and Jarrett moving to rural New Jersey. In addition, Dave Holland,
Jack DeJohnette, and a host of others also settled in Woodstock. Steve Coleman and Fred Hersch
maintain at least a part-time residence in eastern Pennsylvania. Dave Liebman, Phil Woods, and others
reside in the Delaware Water Gap. And, as previously noted, Bill Frisell left New York City for a muchless-densely populatedthough still undeniably urbanarea, Seattle.
Jazz Perspectives
57
In contrast to these sober, even bleak, scenarios, The Pat Metheny Groups ECM
releases such as American Garage offered a vision of a clean and secure jazz world.
White suburban teens heeded the call, buying records and filling seatsno mean feat
for jazz at the time. Methenys appeal to white audiences and his groups white
sound was not lost on the jazz press. Commenting on the Pat Metheny Group in
DownBeat shortly before the release of New Chautauqua, the critic Neil Tesser wrote,
it is a matter, I think, not of white musicians asserting their paleness or some such
nonsense, rather it is a matter of no longer apologizing for this background, as white
musicians have felt more free about incorporating their separate roots into
improvisational music.69 Tesser also noted some discussion of the time that
foresaw Pat Metheny becoming the Brubeck of the 80s. Like Brubeck, Tesser
explained, Metheny offers a driving, valid, and determinedly white music; like
Brubeck, he has counted on college audiences as a major constituency in the early
part of his journey, and has already begun to exert considerable influence on
developing guitarists and composers.70
In Metheny and his bandmates, white, post-Watergate, suburban youth found for
the first time a jazz role model in their own image: raised on rock n roll, but now
slightly above it; long-haired, but not chronically alienated, and almost certainly
college bound. For these young people, this suburbanized pastoral jazz offered a
degree of the hipness still associated with jazzs outsider status, but without the
dangers (real or imagined) of the city versions of the genre.71 Eventually, scores of
other musicians and record companies followed Methenys ECM sound, helping to
shape the subgenre eventually known as smooth jazz. But this is not the only legacy of
the guitarists Americanized pastoral styles.72
69
Neil Tesser and Fred Bourque, Pat Metheny: Musings on Neo Fusion, DownBeat, March 12, 1979,
12.
70
Ibid. Dave Brubecks lineage reaches back to England and Germany, but also to Modoc Indian
peoples. Despite this ancestry, Brubeck is typically understood as a white musician. For a discussion
of the Native American Indian lineage in Brubeck and other jazz musicians including, Jim Hall, Ed
Thigpen, Oscar Pettiford, and many others, see the chapter The Man on the Buffalo Nickel: Dave
Brubeck, in Gene Lees, Cats of Any Color: Jazz, Black and White (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995).
71
For more on race and popular perceptions of jazz and jazz musicians, see, again, Ingrid Monson, The
Problem with White Hipness, Jon Panish, The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American
Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), and Krin Gabbard, Jammin at the Margins: Jazz
and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
72
Hard data has been surprisingly difficult to come by, but my hunch is that the many largely unknown
Metheny clonesyoung guitarists who emulated Methenys sound and styleand other young
instrumentalists around this time also helped to fuel the remarkable expansion of jazz education in the
United States. Although the first major jazz-oriented programs in this countrys colleges date to the mid1950s, supported in large measure by campus visits from bandleaders Stan Kenton, Woody Herman,
and Dave Brubeck, the growth rate of such programs picked up considerable steam only during the
1970s and 1980s, that is, as Metheny and similarly minded musicians rose to prominence. By that time,
Americas suburban youth were expected to attend college to study something. Through the deurbanization (and whitening) of jazz, Middle America found a newly acceptable musical genre for study.
On one hand, jazz had become virtuosic, complex, and serious enough to warrant attention by music
faculty; on the other hand, it was also close enough to homestylistically, geographically, and
culturallyto feel safe and comfortable for rock-nurtured students and their parents. With this rapidly
58
In such ways, Methenys suburban-American pastoral jazz reflected the hopes and
fears of the nations young white middle-class. No doubt, it was just this geo-cultural
shift that inspired some of the backlash by jazz neoclassicists throughout the 1990s
and into the new millennium (both Jarrett and Metheny are conspicuously absent
from Ken Burnss Jazz documentary, for which Wynton Marsalis served as a primary
consultant). While we can understand and even applaud the efforts of Marsalis,
Stanley Crouch, and likeminded individuals toward reminding the nation of jazzs
distinguished black American urban legacy (with Lincoln Center being the most
visible symbol of their success), we should also note that the neoclassicists other
agendato elevate jazzs place on Americas cultural ladder equal to that of European
classical musicprobably could not have succeeded without first establishing a
foothold in the nations Heartland. This move, I offer, was accelerated by the rise of
Americanized pastoral jazz in the 1970s and 1980s.
Conclusion
An idealization of rural and wilderness spaces has a tradition in American arts and
letters dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Although jazz has generally been
thought of in urban cultural contexts, there is a strain of the music that builds upon
and expresses the impulses of this pastoral ideal. I have noted that the recent work of
Norah Jones, Bill Frisell, and others to bring together elements of jazz with country
and other rural-associated genres has important precedents in the music of Pat
Metheny and Keith Jarrett for ECM Records in the 1970s and 1980s. However, my
point here has not simply been to give credit where credit is due or even to make
the case that Jarrett and Metheny were the sole creators of the new sound (we have
already noted Gary Burtons role; Paul Winter, Paul Bley, the group Oregon, Mark
Johnson, and others also contributed), but rather to explore how these jazz musicians
evoked non-urban spacesand, more important, to understand the social and
cultural dimensions of the musics short but consequential passage from the
American city.
expanded college presence, jazz acquired some of the patina of respectability and sophistication enjoyed
by the other disciplines on campus. Not that college music programs always offered the type of jazz that
the new generation of students desired. While the Berklee College of Music and a handful of others
programs adjusted their curricula to accommodate students interest in Methenys music, many schools
continued to stress Kenton-type big band sounds or emphasized bebop-oriented small ensembles, so
students often had to form their own groups outside of class. See Jas Obrecht, Berklee Guitar Programs,
Q/A: Bill Leavitt, Author/Educator, Guitar Player (October 1983), 26. Over time, those who studied
jazz in the 1970s and 1980s have landed teaching positions, and this new generation of jazz faculty has
worked to reshape the curricula, if only by demanding a hipper style of big band chart. Arrangers have
taken notice, and by the turn of this century dozens of arrangements of Pat Metheny tunes had become
available for sale to college and high school ensembles. Trombonist and arranger Bob Curnow, an
alumnus of the Stan Kenton band, has even released a CD of Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays compositions
arranged in the Kenton bands signature big-brass style. Bob Curnows L.A. Big Band, The Music of
Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays (Mama Foundation 1048929, 1995). I welcome hard evidence scholars and
educators either supporting or disputing my claims about the Methenys influence on jazz education.
Jazz Perspectives
59
More to the point: race matters in this discussion, as it always does in jazz, and it is
no accident that white musicians and fans have been the primary drivers of this
subgenre. With few exceptions, black musicians have not engaged in the pastoral jazz
idiom.73 For many African Americans throughout the twentieth century and beyond,
the city has represented opportunity, just as the farm or field often brought to mind a
repulsive past, where one typically remained poor while working somebody elses
land. This held true not only for generations of jazz musicians from the South, but
also for Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and so many other black blues men and
women who left the Mississippi Delta for Chicago and other places up the road.
In the final analysis, this mythologizing or imaging of an idyllic America in the
1970s and 1980s can be understood alternately as a reawakening of a long pastoral
tradition, a newly found respect for a fragile planet, a return to ones musical and
cultural roots, or a disillusionment with and escape from degraded urban centers.
Drawing a large following of white listeners and musicians, this metaphorical move
though largely overlooked by scholars and criticshas profoundly shaped the look
and sound of the music ever since.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful for the perceptive comments I have received on early versions of
this paper from David Borgo, Michael Branch, Larry Engstrom, Charles Hiroshi
Garrett, Daniel Goldmark, Dana Gooley, Louis Niebur, and Robert Walser, as well as
the journals editors and anonymous readers.
Abstract
Jazz has long been identified as an urban genre. Certainly, the standard historical
narratives of the music trace a metropolitan lineage: New Orleans to Chicago to
Kansas City to New York, with other cities, inside and outside the U.S., playing
somewhat lesser roles. In many ways, experts and laypeople alike have understood the
music as not only presented predominantly in urban areas, but also as among the
foremost aural representations of city living. Using such historical contexts as a
backdrop, this article addresses the emergence of a decidedly different geo-cultual
milieu for jazz, one that, while sometimes physically composed, performed, or
distributed in cities, evokes an idyllic America far from the bustle and hum of the
metropolis. The essay focuses particular attention on the key roles played by two
U.S.-born musiciansKeith Jarrett and Pat Methenyin shaping an idealized
notion of non-urban spaces in the 1970s and 1980s.
73
One of those exceptions is Afternoon of a Georgia Faun from African-American saxophonist Marion
Brown. Brown recorded that disc for ECM Records. Marion Brown, Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, ECM
1004, 1971, LP.

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The Emergence of the Rural American

ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis

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century when a back-to-the-land aestheticwhich venerated nature and a

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own Native-Americanist, rural-oriented approaches.39 Among the legion who picked

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New American Guitar Hero

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The Emergence of the Rural American Ideal in Jazz

Bright Size Life (1976)

Metheny (electric guitar)

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Pat Metheny Group (1978) April Wind

New Chautauqua (1979)

American Garage (1980)

Two Folk Songs

As Falls Wichita, So Falls

As Falls Wichita, So Falls

The Fields, The Sky

Metheny (electric guitar)

Pat Metheny Group, Travels, ECM 23791, 1983, LP.

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The Emergence of the Rural American Ideal in Jazz

Carr, Keith Jarrett, 32.

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The Emergence of the Rural American Ideal in Jazz

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The Emergence of the Rural American Ideal in Jazz

records inside cover photo destabilizes essentialized understandings of racial and

This generalization is strongly supported by contemporary country/urban stereotypes on American

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