A big fan of the Pat Metheny Group after the release of their 1977 breakthrough debut album, called Pat Metheny Group, I was taken aback a bit after playing this album only to find there was no guitar player on the album. Being that Pat Metheny is a guitarist first and a fine composer as well, the release of the 2025 album release by the jazz trio known as Transcendence, entitled Music Of Pat Metheny, readily displays another side of Metheny, the composer.

It's easy to say that Pat Metheny fans might not even recognize his music on this album by the music alone, yet there are so many great jazzy sounds on this instrumental Transcendence tribute to one of the great guitarists of the past 50 years. Although the bulk of the album features reinterpretations of Pat Metheny’s compositions, there are also several covers here of music written as well by jazz icons Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett.

The easy on the ears neo-symphonic tribute album is executed vis-à-vis the combined work of Bob Gluck (keyboards), Christopher Dean Sullivan (bass) and Karl Latham (drums). The well-packaged CD kind of ties in to and neatly coincides with a new book by Bob Gluck called Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words. Clearly, Bob knows Pat’s music like a book. Interestingly, on some tracks Bob uses an interesting synth keyboard device to replicate Metheny’s famous horn-like guitar synth sound. Pat Metheny’s 5-decade reign as modern day jazz guitarist and composer is explored on this intriguing 2025 Transcendence tribute album to the music of Pat Metheny.

 

RMR speaks to Bob Gluck of TRANSCENDENCE

RMR: Can you tell us where and when you grew up and when you became interested in music and keyboards and were you influenced by rock music too or was it mostly jazz influences? What jazz, classical and rock artists inspired you to play and record and write about music and how about your early keyboard influences and how that shaped your music?

Bob Gluck: I was born and raised in New York Metropolitan Area. I began playing the piano when I was six. I began by freely improvising piano music responding to the sounds of our apartment. Most of my childhood musical education was at what is now the Julliard Pre-College Division. There, my musical world was strictly Bach-Beethoven-Chopin-Debussy; noted interpreter of Bach Rosalyn Tureck was an important model.

By 1970 I was exclusively playing rock music and influenced by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, and Frank Zappa… but soon after that, Keith Tippett and Cecil Taylor, and I discovered Tony Williams Lifetime, Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, John Cage, and the Herbie Hancock Sextet. In college in the 1970s, I became active as a composer of electronic music, largely using classical tape music techniques and modular analog synthesizers (Buchla, Arp...). I spent little time making music for about fifteen years, but it was during that period that I started listening to Pat Metheny, around 1983.

I’ve never modeled my playing or composing after anyone in particular, although I have long been quite familiar with a broad range of musicians. The era of pianists that most influenced me was the generation of Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and Chick Corea. But also Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, and Don Pullen. I’m generally far more interested in sound in all its manifestations than I am in any particular instrument, including the piano. One might say, though, that it was really Jimi Hendrix, Ornette Coleman, and John Cage who most impacted my thinking.

I began writing articles in college and graduate school, but it was only later, once I was a college professor in the late 1990s, that I really began writing intensively about music. Initially, my writings focused on crafting a very internationalist history of the more experimental side of electronic music from its origins in the 1940s through the 1990s.

 

RMR: Many music fans know Pat Metheny as the groundbreaking jazz-fusion guitarist from the mid 1970s. What convinced you to reinterpret Metheny’s music in a jazz-trio, minus guitars? With Metheny’s vast output of music, from his ECM albums in the mid 1970s to his output up to the 2020’s, how challenging was it to select the music to cover for a guitar-less jazz trio and what eras of Metheny’s music are covered on the Transcendence album?

Bob Gluck: I think of Pat Metheny as a composer first and second as a guitarist. Metheny himself speaks of the guitar as more a tool than the driving force behind his musical thinking. I was aware of his early ECM albums, but other music had more of my attention, in particular, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band. It was really Offramp, 80/81, and Rejoicing that first captivated me, the former due to its sonic beauty and eclecticism; the other two thanks to Metheny’s engagement with former members of Ornette Coleman’s band: Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, and also Billy Higgins. Haden and Redman were also part of Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet, my favorite of Jarrett’s bands.

This is the third of my books that was initiated by my playing the repertoire and, following the book’s completion and publication, returning to playing the music. A body of music gets my attention, I play it, discover musical ideas within that I believe would be of value to other people, to help them listen more deeply to the music, and I’m off and running writing on a book.

The Pat Metheny book began after a Metheny Side-Eye trio concert in 2019, when, after an evening chat, he gave me a copy of his latest published Songbook. I took it home and, while taking breaks from working on a new recording of my own music, I began to play my way through much of his book and found 25 tunes that most spoke to me. Following the usual course of things in my musical life, I decided to place some of these on a set list for a show. Meanwhile, I narrowed my list down to 15 and I found myself with a set list that was all-Metheny.

My goal was not to replicate Pat Metheny’s approach or instrumentation. The way I began was, as always for me, by reducing a tune down to its barebones and seeing where I’d like to go with it. The approach has varied during different performances. This is because when I play music with a keyboards-bass-drums trio, my goal is to make space for as much interplay between the three of us as possible. I choose musicians who are great listeners and really like to “get into it” with the other two of us. I also like to look at each composition with fresh eyes and ears every time I and we play the music, so the interpretations are going to change. This is a feature that I particularly love about duos and trios.

The set list on Transcendence Plays Music of Pat Metheny draws upon a sequence of eras and spans 1981-2012. From the 1980s is “Offramp” and “The Bat”, both released on Offramp, in 1981; there is also a Trio->Live trio version from 2001, about which I address Metheny’s solo in the book.

From the 1990s is “Question And Answer” which was well designed for trio playing; that’s the way Metheny first recorded it with Dave Holland and Roy Haynes (Question and Answer, 1990). “Afternoon” is from the 2000s (Speaking Of Now, 2002), and representing the 2010s is “Roof Dogs,” from Unity Band (2012).

There was other Metheny material recorded during the session; we, the trio, chose the ones we felt were the best performances. The most challenging piece to play proved to be what seems to be the most straight forward, “Afternoon.” It is a lilting, cheerful moderate tempo tune, but one that was recorded with a wordless singer. There would need to be a different way to get at that kind of lyricism; we leaned towards playfulness on this tune.

 

RMR: You have released a number of solo albums since 2008, so how does the Transcendence: Music Of Pat Metheny album fit into your repertoire and back catalog of music? What are some of your most notable or your own personal favorite album releases or recordings?

Bob Gluck: This is the seventh album for small jazz ensemble that I’ve recorded; the repertoire is generally my own music. One of my favorites is Early Morning Star, a mixture of instrumental and vocal settings, from 2020. I’ve also recorded three duo albums, including one with fellow keyboardist, Aruan Ortiz (Textures and Pulsations, 2012). And then I have five solo albums, mostly electronic. My most recent solo album, however, is a series of multi-tracked keyboard recordings of music I composed during the period of the pandemic ( , 2024). I must have had Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays lurking in the back of my mind when I was choosing timbres and textures.

The album that is arguably the closest cousin to Transcendence Plays Music of Pat Metheny is another album with a connection to one of my books, Infinite Spirit: Revisiting The Music Of The Mwandishi Band (2016), with Billy Hart and Eddie Henderson, both original Mwandishi members, plus Christopher Dean Sullivan. In this case, the album was recorded three years after the book release. It was when I was driving home from the Transcendence session that I first thought about doing a book about Pat Metheny.

 

RMR: Tell us about working with Chris and Karl who play with you on Transcendence: Music Of Pat Metheny. What’s the chemistry like? Karl Latham’s drumming is brilliant as well. How and when did you meet those guys? Karl’s latest tribute album to the 1960s, Living Standards II is quite amazing too.

Bob Gluck: Chris and I have been playing together since 2010, if not earlier. We’ve done multiple projects together; he’s been my most regular collaborator; drummer Tani Tabbal may come in second. Chris is an incredibly inventive, empathetic player. What became the Transcendence project began as a duo with Chris. It was at his suggestion that we added Karl when I was booked for a trio gig. The chemistry was immediately evident. Karl’s range is among the widest I have personally experienced among drummers. He really makes this music takeoff, sometimes as an accompanist, but often right in the fray. I think that his latest album is indeed really terrific.

 

RMR: Tell us about the keyboards you play on the Transcendence tribute album to Pat? I noticed on “Offramp” Pat used some exotic guitar synths on that track. Sounds like you emulated that on your Music Of Pat Metheny cover. Anyway, it sounds great. Do you play synths on your other albums too?

Bob Gluck: I have been using Studiologic hammer action keyboard controllers for several years and I love them. The second keyboard is a first generation Roli Seaboard Grand. It is highly unusual; it’s sponge-like “keywaves” are really a continuous controller that allow all sorts of bending of pitch and other parameters. It’s successor, the Roli Seaboard 2 is a little more conventional, while allowing responsiveness to a greater number of touch parameters. I’ve always wished the piano allowed more direct access to shaping sound and I’ve built some controller prototypes myself. This is distinctly not a piano, but neither is it quite like anything else.

I hear what you mean by “emulating” Pat’s sound; you are referring to his Roland guitar synthesizer. I address some of its technicalities in my book, but the Roland is a unique instrument in which the vibrations of the strings themselves are the source of information that is translated to the synthesizer engine. The Roli, on the other hand, is really a MIDI controller, albeit a more complex one than the standard fair keyboard.

I think of the timbre I use on the album as more a tribute to Hendrix than to Pat. It does share the “soaring” quality of the sound Pat uses, but the twisting and turning on the edge between pitch and distortion is very much Hendrix-inspired. Incidentally, I think of this as an album of largely Metheny repertoire, not a tribute album or a cover album. We are playing compositions by other people, but treating them quite freely, albeit acknowledging their composer’s musical ideas.

 

RMR: How about the other covers on the Music Of Pat Metheny album? There are some other artists covered on the same album, including Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. Can you draw a line comparing Metheny’s music with Herbie and Keith? Are there parallels you uncovered? I know both Pat and Keith were long time ECM artists.

Bob Gluck: Again, I don’t think of these as covers, per se. They are interpretations that the trio had to offer at the moment of this recording. Our performances of the same music has sounded quite different during other sessions. The Herbie Hancock tune, “Dolphin Dance” is a favorite of mine; it has appeared periodically on my set lists over the years, and I recorded it as a duet with Chris Sullivan on the trio album Something Quiet (2011), with saxophonist Joe Giardullo on the other tracks.

The Keith Jarrett tune, from the repertoire of his 1970s “American” Quartet, and the trio that preceded it, is one of a number of pieces I’ve played from that body of work. It is a beautiful, alternately ironic and romantic, frolicking and somber piece of music and it provides rich material for improvisation.

Keith Jarrett was, during that period, one of several composers who were working with related musical ideas. In particular, this is stepwise basslines, a concept that Gary Burton and Steve Swallow were exploring in the late 1960s into the early 1970s. During the latter portion of this period, Pat Metheny was the guitarist in their band. The idea of long, sequentially moving bass lines, juxtaposed with simple chords, is an important element in Pat’s compositional toolkit that helps create structures that offer space for the kind of extended line solos he champions. In my book, I refer to these as long “narrative arcs,” using the word “narrative” not literally, but as a metaphor.

 

RMR: The Music Of Pat Metheny album was released on FMR Records. Tell us about FMR and working with them and who else was instrumental in helping finish and release the album?

Bob Gluck: FMR Records is a record company in the United Kingdom run by Trevor Taylor. Their album cover art and design is by Ewan Rigg. They are a terrific team to work with. Transcendence is the sixth album of mine that they have released. At the core of their releases is music by the open improvisational world of the UK, saxophonists Paul Dunmall and Elton Dean and many others. Trevor himself is a fine percussionist and his work is represented in their catalog. The recording engineer was our drummer, Karl Latham, with mixing and mastering at Firefly Studio by a real master, Paul Wickliffe. I took the nature photographs, and along with elements from a painting by my late Dad, Ewan created a beautiful design

 

RMR: Can you tell us something about your new book about Pat Metheny called Stories Beyond Words? How did you prepare and research that book and can you give us some insights into how you covered Pat Metheny’s music in the book? What other books have you written? Being a keyboardist / bandleader as well as an author is a rare commodity among musicians. 

Bob Gluck: This is my fourth book, the third published by University of Chicago Press. Like my 2024 book The Musical World of Paul Winter (Terra Nova Editions), it addresses an individual musician as opposed to a band or bands. As I mentioned, it emerged from my experience of playing Pat’s music, and finding that I was thinking deeply about his musical ideas and thoughts about form and sound, among other issues. I then asked Pat what he thought about the idea of the book and he agreed. Pat was a dialog partner in this adventure for nearly three years. I conducted interviews with other Metheny associates and reference previous published interviews he’s done. At its core, though, the book reflects my understanding of what makes Pat’s music tick. In a sense it is a listener’s guide. It was a real joy to look closely at this wonderful and diverse body of music.

 

RMR: What plans do you have for 2025 including concerts, writing and recording and releasing music?

Bob Gluck: Honestly, it has been an incredibly busy two years, resulting in the release of two albums and two books. The trio Transcendence is planning to continue playing shows highlighting the music of Pat Metheny, but also other composers, maybe even some of my own. My own work has generally inhabited a separate track of activity. I am also working on a fifth book. This one is about the late 1960s Downtown New York City “intermedia” and electronic music scene surrounding composer Morton Subotnick, the discotheque The Electric Circus, and a pioneering series The Electric Ear and its successor, Intermedia at Automation House. I am also in the middle of another long-term compositional project that will take me into 2026.