JAZZ : He’s Got a New Axe to Grind : Approaching 40, guitarist Pat Metheny has gladly assumed the role of sideman to saxophone phenom Joshua Redman

After working with minimalist composer Steve Reich, pop craftsman Bruce Hornsby, free-jazz avatar Ornette Coleman and the London Symphony Orchestra, guitarist Pat Metheny would seem to have exhausted most of the weird career moves available to him. Not quite, however. Right now Metheny is touring some of the smallest jazz clubs in the United States as a sideman to Joshua Redman, a tenor saxophonist who is 15 years younger than him and just out of college.

Metheny, whose crossover popularity attracts stadium-size crowds the world over, offers a few reasons for this voluntary drop in status. One is that he, like a lot of other musicians and critics, considers the 24-year-old Redman to be the most exciting jazz discovery of the past 15 years. And most of the other reasons have to do with kicking back and having a nostalgic good time.

Indeed, after a pair of career-summing records--last year’s 76-minute magnum opus “Secret Story” and the recently released live CD and video “The Road to You”--Metheny appears to be taking things back to basics as he approaches his 40th birthday. The future recording projects he talks about are mainly duet and solo guitar projects, and the Joshua Redman Quartet, which plays Monday to Wednesday at Catalina in Hollywood and Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. The Redman group allows Metheny to shun both the spotlight and his trademark high-technology guitar sound for a set of mostly pure be-bop.

“This is the most overtly traditional situation I’ve found myself in since I was in high school in Kansas City playing in organ trios,” the perpetually suntanned Metheny agrees during an interview inside the windowless mustiness of New York’s Village Vanguard, where the quartet performed to sold-out crowds recently.

“Joshua is harmonically very--I don’t want to say ‘conservative,’ but he does play more straight up and down than the other saxophone players I’ve played with. Most of the other guys I’ve played with, it’s almost free most of the time. With Josh, it’s something that lays easy on the guitar. It’s really comfortable. It’s straight-ahead and very fluid.”

Ironically, it was only 15 months ago that Metheny was bemoaning the conservatism of young be-bop players in an interview with Down Beat magazine. But then a couple of months later he was working at the Power Station recording studios in New York and heard Redman, then only 23 and freshly signed to Warner Bros. Records, recording the Thelonious Monk tune “Trinkle Tinkle” for his debut album.

“Within a second of hearing him,” Metheny recalls, “I thought: ‘This guy’s got it.’ ”

The pair got to talking, and it turned out that one of Redman’s favorite recordings was Metheny’s “Rejoicing,” a 1983 album recorded with drummer Billy Higgins and bass player Charlie Haden. Faster than you can say “mutual admiration society,” Redman and Metheny had called up Higgins and Haden, booked three days of studio time and high-tailed it down to the Village Vanguard for a session.

The result is Redman’s second album for Warner Bros., “Wish,” a collection of original Metheny and Redman tunes combined with jazz standards like Charlie Parker’s “Moose the Mooche” and pop music covers like Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.” A year after it was recorded, Metheny and Redman have hit the road in the States and Europe for a tour with Higgins and 21-year-old bass virtuoso Christian McBride.

Since Metheny signed to Geffen Records in 1986, his music has zigzagged almost willfully from the dark and jagged textures of “Song X,” a collaboration with Ornette Coleman that is widely regarded as one of the decade’s finest jazz records, to his own group albums and such occasional side projects as Steve Reich’s extended composition “Electric Counterpoint.”

Relentless touring has given Metheny’s lifestyle a similar rootlessness; the closest thing he has to a home is a telephone answering machine in a friend’s basement in Boston.

“Secret Story” was the cumulative result of all these journeys, an epic musical collage that involved the talents of 80 musicians and incorporated ethnic music from India and Cambodia, scored orchestrations for the London Symphony Orchestra and a panoply of sampled sounds from the Synclavier. The record won a Grammy, though more than a few critics found it perplexing and slightly unwieldy.

Metheny himself expresses absolute satisfaction with the record, however.

“Of all the things I’ve done as a musician, that still remains for me the best,” he says. “When that record was done and in the can, I thought, ‘OK, if I get hit by a truck tomorrow, I’m cool.’

And while he resists any attempt to ascribe a logical progression to his career, the guitarist’s forthcoming projects appear to be radically scaled back. One is a planned album of duets with Haden, and another is a solo guitar record called “Zero Tolerance for Silence,” which was recorded earlier this year in a two-hour burst of inspiration.

“There’s nothing I can say about it--and in fact I’m not going to say anything about it, even when it comes out,” Metheny says with an enigmatic smile. “It’s a kind of music that I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like.”

The collaboration with Redman also has historical associations, because 13 years ago Metheny recorded the album “80/81” with Dewey Redman, the Texas tenorman who is Joshua’s father. It was during the tour to promote “80/81” that Dewey Redman introduced Metheny to his then 11-year-old son, who lived with his mother in Berkeley.

“It’s funny because I meet lots of people all the time, but I remember Josh so well,” Metheny says. “I remember watching him watch the show, and he was definitely checking the stuff out.”

In the intervening years, Metheny heard intermittent reports of the younger Redman’s progress--his straight-A performance at Berkeley High School, his graduation in 1991 from Harvard University’s urban studies program and his admission to Yale University Law School. But until he heard Redman play “Trinkle Tinkle” last fall, Metheny had assumed that the young man was heading for a law degree.

“But Josh has got a career going now--it’s really happening for him,” Metheny says with an admiring laugh. “He’s sort of been picked as the Golden Horn.”

Indeed, it’s a measure of the vertiginous trajectory of Redman’s career that in the 13 months since he recorded “Wish” he has rocketed from obscurity to being the most feted jazz player since Wynton Marsalis.

Six months ago, just as his self-titled debut album was being released to ecstatic reviews, Redman played the Village Vanguard with his quartet and whipped New York’s jazz critics into a lather. “Go to the Village Vanguard this week and watch history in the making,” Gene Seymour advised in New York Newsday. By June, Redman was trading licks with President Bill Clinton at Carnegie Hall, and he has since been dubbed best new artist by JazzTimes magazine and hot jazz artist by Rolling Stone.

“It’s been a really exciting year--incredibly exciting,” says Redman, interviewed later in the evening a few hours before show time. Possessed of a rangy six-foot frame, a Cheshire cat smile and a flat-top fade haircut that gives him a profile of striking nobility, Redman manages to convey both youthful enthusiasm and self-assured maturity.

“I don’t see myself as the Golden Horn; I don’t see myself as the Messiah,” he says between sips of a glass of cola. “I’m just a young musician who’s pretty inexperienced. I mean, I’ve only been doing this seriously for two years.”

This is the part of Redman’s story that defies belief--that until he came to New York in 1991 on a break from college, he had rarely practiced his instrument. In just a couple of years, he has acquired the swaggering confidence of a young titan.

With his brawny tone, blues rootsiness and telepathic ability to conceptualize, Redman reminds many listeners of Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson in their younger days.

“The main thing Joshua has--and it’s been so long since anyone showed up who has this as a priority--is a really natural narrative sense of improvising,” Metheny says. “Most guys play in real short, sound-bite kind of phrases. Josh . . . naturally takes his time to develop each thing he plays.”

Says Redman, who himself cites Rollins and Henderson as key influences: “Music has to have feeling and emotion and meaning--it has to tell a story. I never want it to be narrative in the intellectual sense. I want it to be narrative in the emotional sense; more like reading a short story or novel than reading a dissertation.”

There’s also something of his father’s soulful earthiness to Redman’s tone, which is surprising considering that Redman was actually raised by his mother in Berkeley and absorbed his father’s sound largely through listening to records. Until they recorded “Choices” for the Enja label a couple of years ago, father and son had hardly played together, and 63-year-old Dewey Redman remains an underappreciated figure on the jazz scene despite his groundbreaking early work with Ornette Coleman and his own extensive recording career.

“Josh is real cool, he’s a very intelligent person,” Metheny says. “Also, the fact that he’s Dewey’s son--and knows, as we all do, just how bad Dewey is--gives him a real perspective on things. All of the things that are happening with him, he knows just where to put those relative to the music.”