MUSIC REVIEW : New Metheny Is Brilliant, Challenging

Guitarist Pat Metheny’s newest release, “Secret Story,” is asoundscape as varied and colorful as a whirlwind world tour.

Blending synthesizers, various instruments and even the London Symphony Orchestra with Metheny’s guitar, the new music came out as Metheny’s cathartic release during the breakup of a relationship.

The thought of bringing this highly personal, complex music to a live setting might have made a lesser artist stay home or fall back on earlier, simpler material. Instead, Metheny rearranged the songs for a hand-picked touring band and hit the road.

Metheny’s tour bus rolled into San Diego on Wednesday night, and Metheny played for a sell-out crowd at Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay.

Listeners were challenged, rewarded and sometimes overwhelmed by a demanding set that stretched to more than two hours and showed the ever-broadening reach of Metheny’s music.

The show emphasized his new material, but Metheny also dropped in a few earlier tunes, including “Are You Going With Me,” “Last Train Home” and “Third Wind.”

Since launching his career during the late 1970s with jazz and fusion, Metheny, who has an ongoing love affair with Brazil, has matured into a sophisticated player and composer who embraces jazz, rock, pop and classical elements deftly interwoven with indigenous sounds from several continents.

Jangling percussion, synthesized strings and tropical chants invited the audience into “Above the Treetops,” based on a traditional Cambodian hymn, the opening cut on “Secret Story” and also the opener Wednesday. Metheny stepped from the shadows with his acoustic guitar to play the spare, fragmented melody.

“Facing West,” also from “Secret Story,” followed, and the first half of the show was all from “Secret Story,” except for “How Insensitive,” the Brazilian standard by Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Metheny has a knack for composing visually, for painting imaginary pictures with his music. He has written music for several movies, including “Falcon and the Snowman” and “Fandango,” and much of the new music would be perfect for motion pictures.

But several of the songs unfold so gradually that some audience members began to squirm. Metheny takes simple musical themes and turns them over and over, exploring endless realms of possibility.

Listeners who hung with him were rewarded with surprising twists and turns that led to ingenious, emotionally satisfying resolutions. Metheny is a musical storyteller, and his compositions and improvisations are moving because they have a beginning, middle and end, well-defined by subtle use of dynamics, space and rhythmic shifts.

On “Above the Treetops,” for example, Metheny traded sections with his background vocalists in an effective call-and-response. The easy exchange of emotion between the human voices and Metheny’s guitar showed how sensitive a player he is.

Metheny brings many guitars with him, and not just for show. Whether soloing on guitar synthesizer with an eerie, distant tone, bending notes on a hard-bodied guitar in a rock-and-roll vein or letting his fingers fly lightly over the frets of his familiar fat-bodied jazz guitar, Metheny is always captivating.

He is fleet, but he doesn’t let his speed stampede a listener. Instead, he uses space as an effective frame for musical ideas.

Metheny was ably supported by his three longtime bandmates, bassist Steve Rodby, percussionist Armando Marcal and drummer Paul Wertico.

The five other members of the touring band were equally vital. Keyboard players Gil Goldstein and Jim Beard provided orchestral colors, two very capable bodies taking some of the London Symphony’s parts. Mark Ledford and David Blamires contributed vocals, percussion, horns, guitars and just about anything else a song demanded, and Torsten Dewinkel added a second guitar.

Those who came to hear Metheny the guitar hero might have been disappointed by the prominent presence of Metheny the emerging composer-arranger. This newer dude is as interested in ensemble textures as the warm, appealing sound of his guitar.

But Metheny left no doubt that at 38, he is one of the most gifted musicians around, rapidly moving beyond his early jazz and fusion roots to explore challenging new contexts.