Pat Metheny’s Buffalo ‘Dream Box’ show - an intimate, immersive and beautiful evening

The guitarist’s solo performance at UB’s Center for the Arts finds him celebrating an immense body of work in the present tense

Design by Kim Miers.

“You guys good out there? It’s so quiet in here!”

Pat Metheny was 15 minutes into his Dream Box tour stop at the University at Buffalo’s Center for the Arts on Thursday, and he needn’t have worried - our quietude was born of rapt attention and deep immersion, not casual indifference. The truth is, Metheny had us spellbound from the moment he sat down center-stage and fingerpicked the evening’s first chord on his nylon string acoustic guitar. 

That this current tour finds Metheny performing alone, with the help of only a gorgeous selection of guitars, a looper pedal, and some minimal tech and self-generated accompaniment, makes our instantaneous submission to the imaginative world he summoned all the more remarkable. The truth is, there are few artists capable of commanding our attention in the solo format. Much of live music’s magic can be posited to interaction between musicians, after all. 

By approaching the show as if he’d gathered some friends in an intimate space to play for them, tell some stories, and lose himself in the improvisational sway of his own performance, Metheny made the evening an unforgettable one, a gig that transcended its very nature to become something wholly other. 

Photo by Bing Liem.

Oh, and that whole “story-telling” thing? Well, anyone who is familiar with Metheny knows that chatting up the crowd has never been his forte - he’s always been there to speak to us through his compositions, and the most you were likely to hear from him was a thank you and a band introduction. So this one-man show offered twin firsts - the focus on the guitar as sole purveyor of musical information, and the warm, conversational vibe of the between-song patter. 

“Weirdly, ‘playing the guitar’ is about the 5th thing on the list for me, in terms of how I think of what my life as a musician is like, and has been, over the years,” Metheny told me in a recent interview during the early days of the Dream Box tour. “These evenings really require a focus on playing the instrument that, honestly, is kind of new for me, and in a way, that is one of the most exciting aspects of it all.”

It was exciting for us, too, as Metheny took to the stage and launched into the first of what would be several medleys of pieces he either composed or has been associated with throughout his career, with daring, tightrope-walking improvisation acting as the glue holding these pieces together. 

The first of these was pretty mind-blowing, and featured Metheny on nylon-string guitar melding “Phase Dance/Antonia/Minuano (Six Eight)/This is Not America” into a seamless multi-movement piece. I was struck immediately by the fact that Metheny’s all-but-peerless virtuosity was not even in the same zip code as the point of it all - the compositions were the road, the guitar was the car, and Metheny was both driver and passenger. 

“I’ve made 53 records,” Metheny told us after this transcendent opening medley. “Tonight is about all of that, about exploring it all and having fun.” 

He went on to tell us that, though he is revered as a guitarist, gaining that reverence was never his primary intention. 

“I write everything on the piano,” he casually remarked, and suddenly, my own 40 years of fandom made perfect sense to me - Metheny has been able to communicate through instrumental music on the highest level precisely because he approaches everything as a composer, not as some dude eager to punch everyone in the face with his six-string dexterity and land himself on the cover of Guitar Player Magazine. This fact provides a musical storytelling through-line connecting all his work. 

A medley celebrating material from Beyond the Missouri Sky, Metheny’s Grammy-winning 1996 duet album with the late bassist and composer Charlie Haden, found our man moving to the steel-string acoustic guitar, and honoring an album and a departed friend that clearly still mean a lot to him. 

Metheny recalled arriving to work on the album with Haden, after being told to “bring some acoustic guitars along,” something he did willingly, if somewhat bemusedly, since so much of his work has been associated with the hollow-body electric “jazz box.” Haden eventually “tricked me into playing acoustic on the whole album,” Metheny told us with a chuckle, before proclaiming of the album, “People get married to it, and people get buried to it,” noting its enduring stature as a fan favorite from his immense catalog. His interpretive sense of what are primarily Haden’s compositions proved to be particularly moving during the medley, which included a poignant take on “Message to A Friend”. 

Though Metheny is responsible for crafting an abundance of timeless, enduring melodies, there’s more to the man than that - after all, this is the guy who released the album Zero Tolerance for Silence in 1994, an in-your-face aural assault that one might argue is akin to Lou Reed’s sonic endurance test Metal Machine Music. An in-the-moment improvisational piece that followed the Missouri Sky medley celebrated the gleeful experimentalist that is an aspect of Metheny’s musical personality, as it blended a percussive attack, string-scraping, atonal randomness and confrontational harmonies afforded by a sparsely employed looping pedal. The sum result sounded as menacing as a piece by Tool or Mogwai, but was also a celebration of atonality and randomness as high-art. 

Metheny offered us an evening of music that felt both personal and universal. It was a deeply moving celebration of composition, improvisation, intimacy and empathy. And it went by like a beautiful dream.