Pat Metheny for Warped Tour
"San Lorenzo" by Pat Metheny Group (1978)
Most of the instrumental music I listen to is from video games, I admit. Tristan Alric’s score for Bug Fables? Wall to wall bangers. Koji Kondo’s themes from Mario? I grade papers to that shit. Crush40’s Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks? You already know what tf is going on.
As ascendant as these songs may be, you are necessarily doing Something Else while listening to them in a video game. For many, instrumental music is purposefully relegated to the background. Even if it excites or soothes, it’s rarely meant to be the focus. While this may also be true for many when it comes to music with vocals, I think it’s more common for instrumental. The lofi beats to study/relax to type stuff.
In my father’s retirement, he has gotten several hives of honeybees, and our family has become his deputy beekeepers. Every August we suit up to spend a day extracting frames of honeycomb and collecting the golden bounty. Many families in Vermont have their sweet harvests on the other end of winter, boiling maple syrup all night long. Both are sweaty laborious processes. Both are, if you think about it, the conversion of sunshine to sugar.
The sun lances light out into the universe, and all the flowers’ tiny satellite dishes take it in, then along come my quarter-million legion of six-legged sisters to gather the pollen and nectar, bring it home and turn it into food. Long has man marveled at and envied this natural alchemy.
I think Pat Metheny has come about as close as can be to this process. The opening number of his group’s self-titled debut, “San Lorenzo”, is the sonic equivalent of a sunny day. Not just a nice day to take a walk. Not a tropical vacation on a beach, draped in specious colonial garb. The sunny day in mid-winter that promises, oh yes, the seasons will persist.
It makes sense that the album was recorded in Norway, a place where the sun is vindictively absent for a good portion of the year. “San Lorenzo” is a spell for summoning the sun through the clouds. It’s no wonder we spent centuries worshipping that distant ball of fire, when look how it rules our entire physical existence.
When I worked at Staples in high school the store had its own proprietary playlist of terrible Top 40, but once we locked the doors to cash out the registers, I was allowed to plug in my iPod nano and blast whichever Rise Against album was wrapped around my amygdala. The distorted sonic bath was perhaps ironic consolation to the drudgery of minimum wage retail work. It helped me count bills and coins and drymop the aisles. Sped things along. “San Lorenzo” would’ve kept me from getting anything done. I’d still be trapped in that strip mall Staples, which closed down years ago. The façade is remains, and shit still lines the shelves. I wouldn’t mind, honestly, if that song just kept spinning. “San Lorenzo” could save Sisyphus.
I will often put this record on when I’m working in the print shop or at the bookstore, knowing full well it’s going to stop me from progressing with whatever task is at hand. I want to linger and listen and do nothing but focus on the feeling.
While the album’s second track “Phase Dance” became the group’s signature song and longtime live-opener, “San Lorenzo” stands above with it’s wonderful movement through tempo, time, and emotion. There are passages of lackadaisical play, there are disciplined and driving runs, there are wonderful refrains and moments of reprise that recontextualize what first appeared bright or somber moments, turning sunshine into shadow and vice versa. The more I write about it, the more I feel I impoverish your eventual impression of it. That is ultimately what instrumental music offers us, a shot of pure sonic emotion, beyond our articulable language. For those of us who aren’t musicians we can struggle to describe exactly what music makes us feel, because the most astute articulation of that feeling is the extant music. Lacking’s lyrics, we’re left to our own abstract reckoning with the images Metheny’s guitar paints. The late Lyle Mays truly dances across the keys, and proves to me that his name probably should’ve been part of the group’s moniker. He earned his grammys and credits, sure, but his gentle touch is as integral to the song’s composition as Metheny’s stardom shredding. So much of Jazz, and by extension fusion, is about the shared space of instruments, and about the solar flares of solos. Reinventing, riffing, and covering are all standard practice. As perfect a piece as I consider “San Lorenzo”, I am not sure it could withstand the removal of any parts. It is not a folksong, confidently surviving and thriving in a stripped-down setting, shouted along in a tavern near you. In it’s own way, “San Lorenzo” is a spare a composition as can be. Nothing is wasted, nothing superfluous. It’s rigor is hidden behind the wonderful, warm feeling of listening to it while on a sunset drive, or while sipping a glass of something on a balcony. This is jazz for people who think jazz is beneath them—elevator music—or who think it too heady, to self-serious and insular. This is sunshine. You need not stare into it, but don’t let anything else distract you for ten minutes. Simply bask. We’re all worthy.
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Lovely piece. I had never heard of Pat Metheny until I watched Jojo's Bizarre Adventure a couple years ago, which used "Last Train Home" as the credits music for some time. Very different vibes from "San Lorenzo" but similarly evocative.