Chad Batka for The New York Times
From left, Pat Metheny, Antonio Sanchez, Chris Potter and Ben Williams at Town Hall.
Near the end of Pat Metheny's capacious performance with his new quartet and his old machines on Friday night at Town Hall, he played his new song "Breakdealer," and the best music of the night happened. It's a medium-fast song with a hard rhythm and heavy accents; it's a little dire, messaging right away that something's going to go down, and it did.
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Chad Batka for The New York Times
Pat Metheny The guitarist and his new quartet, touring on their album "Unity Band," played Town Hall on Friday.
The tenor saxophonist Chris Potter played an aggressive and resolutely tonal solo like an organized assault. The bassist Ben Williams bounced on the root notes. The drummer Antonio Sanchez distributed his rhythm around the whole kit, applying pressure. But Mr. Metheny was especially intense. He played melodic solos with stubborn lengths and shapes of phrase, double-stop drone chords and a long period of machinelike up-and-down strokes.
This version went far beyond what's represented on the band's recent album, "Unity Band," on Nonesuch. It contained both a representation of jazz aesthetics and a physical exhilaration similar to what a new kind of punk-prog rock band with simpler aims — like the Psychic Paramount, say — can deal out. It was so clearly engineered to blow people's minds on a real-time, hands-on-instruments level that it could make you wonder: Why doesn't he do a whole concert like this?
His audience might not be able to take more than an hour of it, and they pay high prices to see his concerts. And he has other ideas for how to blow your mind, sometimes ones that you haven't thought of. (Like his Orchestrion tour, in 2010: solo guitar backed by a mechanical, solenoids-and-pneumatics orchestra.) He has a body of work broader than nearly anyone identified as a jazz musician. A narrow focus on one mood is likely not in his best interests.
To a certain way of thinking, Mr. Metheny remains appealing and important precisely because he goes in so hard, because his obsessions are so pointed. On the other hand, one of his obsessions seems to be balance. He played most of the new album, giving you his new melodies and the sound of his working band, which moves in wave forms between tight and loose. He's still using the orchestrion, in reduced form — mostly for percussion but also for some accordion lines and chords produced by tuned glass bottles, all activated remotely. Those extra elements thicken the sound, which the music seems to demand — especially when using his guitar synthesizer, which he reserves for his most red-blooded soloing, and which gets really loud. But though the orchestrion remains an impressive human achievement, it's still rhythmically charmless.
He also gave you unaccompanied acoustic playing, on his 42-string, four-necked guitar, and duets with each member of the band on older Metheny songs and standards. (He and Mr. Potter devoured the changes of Miles Davis's "Solar" — the tune now widely understood to be more or less Chuck Wayne's "Sonny" — within a couple of minutes.) He played swing rhythm and slow waltz and an approximation of samba, bright and dark guitar tones, soft and loud, busy and spacious. His songlike, expressive single-note guitar-solo voice stayed in play a fair amount: Sometimes that was all the song-to-song continuity a listener might get. Really, it was like a concert by three or four different bands; you couldn't have felt cheated. But you might have felt disappointed not to hear more of the one you most responded to.
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