In road show, Metheny is all about technique

Guitarist Pat Metheny has been a legendary road warrior. For a 15-year period in the 1970s and ‘80s, he spent most of his time on tour, totaling nearly 900,000 miles in his band’s travel van. These days, still traveling almost incessantly, he journeys in considerably more luxurious comfort. On Saturday night, while his group was preparing for a Royce Hall concert, the backstage parking area was filled with two huge, elegant-looking buses and a pair of enormous 18-wheeler trucks -- all dedicated to the comfort and the transport of a six-piece band.

The up side of virtually continual touring is the establishment of a large, supportive listener base. In Metheny’s case, the result was a sold-out house for the UCLA event, which ran for three hours without an intermission. The down side of night after night of concertizing is that it allows little room to try out new material and find new interpretations of old material. In fact, for a jazz artist, the irony of the increased popularity generated by touring is the fact that -- as with pop music -- it tends to enhance the need to play songs with as little variation as possible from the audience-friendly, recorded versions.

In that sense, it was fascinating to compare the Metheny group’s Royce Hall performance with an appearance earlier this year at Universal Amphitheatre before a considerably larger crowd. Not only was the material similar, but so, too, were the performances, as well as the amiable Metheny’s brief remarks to his listeners. In both cases, craftsmanship tended to take precedence over imaginativeness, with the occasionally adventurous moments of the Universal performance morphing into what was -- especially on Metheny’s part -- largely a display of technical virtuosity.

Moving from one instrument to another -- including a few numbers on his 42-string Pikasso guitar and the sweet-sounding soprano acoustic guitar -- he seemed determined to jam as many notes as possible into every measure. Initially exciting, the fast-fingered displays soon became distracting, especially when they were applied to more pensive pieces such as Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Insensitive.”

By the time the lengthy set had concluded, it was not the facile predictability of the Metheny jazz fusion sound generated by the core trio of longtime associates Metheny, pianist Lyle Mays and bassist Steve Rodby that remained in memory. Far more captivating were the spontaneous solo efforts of the newer, less road-hardened players: bassist, singer and multi-instrumentalist Richard Bona, trumpeter and singer Cuong Vu, and drummer Antonio Sanchez.