Full Circle on Pat Metheny’s “First Circle”
I interviewed Pat Metheny for JazzTimes at length in 2005 and 2010, both for cover stories in the mag. And right in between that five-year span, while living in Philadelphia (2007–08), I stopped playing guitar. Never opened a guitar case in Philly. I was freelancing for the Inquirer, things were humming along, and I’d hit a wall in my playing, after many years gigging in New York with singers and bands. I didn’t like listening to myself. I no longer knew what my musical goals were, but my writing goals were clear and right in front of me. A bummer, maybe, but not a tragedy.
I gradually came back to the guitar after returning to NYC in late 2008, with a promise to myself that I would play acoustic and it would be fun, dammit. No work. And no attempting to play bebop licks or super-hip chord solos. It’s covers all the way, back to my roots — Squeeze, Joe Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Spinners, Jackson 5, Donna Summer, Carole King, James Taylor, Doobies, list goes on. Just get the fingers and the ears working, no sheet music, no garbage tabs or chord symbols on the internet — all by ear, with rare exceptions, just like I was doing in rock bands at age 16.
Somewhere along the way I’d acquired a thick book from Hal Leonard called the Pat Metheny Songbook (1999), with thousand-percent accurate charts for a great many tunes, worked on by Pat himself. Skimming through it I found myself picking up the axe and having a go at some of the ones I loved, which were reasonably accessible on the instrument. This is not a guitar book, though — it’s condensed scores, no tabs, but lots of chord symbols. So the guitarist has to troubleshoot and make decisions about what’ll work for their purposes, find good voice leading, etc., and no two players will do the same thing.
I got a lot from the little I did in this book, but I put its bigger challenges and implications to the side for a long time. I did tell Pat, though, in our 2010 interview, about how I’d been testing the waters again, and working a little on “First Circle,” although whew, good luck executing it up to tempo. Pat replied, grinning empathetically: “Yeah, it’s tough.”
I don’t know why, but “First Circle” called out to me again the other day. I’d been playing a lot of classical guitar, testing those waters too, and thought another look at the chamber-like arpeggiated intro of “First Circle” might be in order. (In the clip below it occurs between 1:11–1:48.) I abandoned that quickly as not within my reach, but I realized that the main body of the tune, at letters C and D (2:29–4:43), was doable.
Letter C is a 15-bar A section, mainly in 22/8 with a dotted bar line, so you feel it as alternating 6/4 and 5/4. Then A repeats and it’s 16 bars, thanks to an extra bar of 6/8 in the second ending. Then comes letter D, which pivots between 4/4 and 6/8 for 20 bars. Then D.S. back to letter C, giving us AABA form, simple as that. After the last A you go to the coda, which in this case is the whole rest of the nine-minute epic.
If flipping through the Pat Metheny Songbook 15 years ago was intimidating, it became less so after I went back to music school, at UGA, to get my teaching certificate. There I learned to conduct mixed meters for choir, and do these beastly Hindemith exercises, and my chops expanded. Things started to fall into place, because these increased skills are transferable, as we music educators say.
So here it is: “First Circle,” at letters C and D, omitting the first repeat for sake of brevity (actually, because my vocal on the first A needed deleting).
