Pat Metheny, A Jazz-Fusion Master, Is Still Thriving And Improvising At 40

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The Pat Metheny Group, 8 p.m. tomorrow, Seattle Center Arena; $22.50-$30, 628-0888.

Pat Metheny is one of our consummate creative artists, a popular musician who enjoys the remarkable freedom to take chances, without losing his audience.

"I have no fear of failure," declared the 40-year-old guitarist, reached by phone in Los Angeles. "I'm lucky. Most of my records sell pretty much the same, no matter what I record."

Over the past 10 years, Metheny has produced deliciously melodic pop/jazz efforts, concept albums and intense jazz collaborations with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, John Scofield and Roy Haynes. He has toured and recorded with neoclassical young lion Joshua Redman and delivered a powerful, industrial-strength solo rock-guitar album, "Zero Tolerance For Silence."

Critics, fans stand by him

Critics and industry insiders have stuck by him through it all, delivering six Grammy awards for the group's last six recordings. Jazz fans consistently vote him No. 1 in the polls.

Back in the saddle with his regular band (including longtime keyboardist Lyle Mays) after a six-year hiatus, Metheny is riding high again as a jazz-fusion guitar hero. His 20th recording, "We Live Here," is nestled comfortably at No. 2 on the contemporary jazz charts.

Many jazz musicians aren't comfortable talking about their music, but Metheny spins out reels of sentences with the same felicity with which his fingers follow the frets of his guitar. He was exuberant on a wide range of topics, pulling out bright metaphors to elaborate points about his new recording and tour.

"When I listen to my early albums," he explained, "I realize I was fresh out of the Midwest, where there's a lot of open space. You can hear that in the music. All those white zones, so to speak. But over the last five years, my life has gotten progressively more complicated. The music is more dense. It's like a canvas that's completely full of paint."

About a year ago, Metheny took three months off, to take stock of this dense canvas. He and Mays rented a house in Miami and dug in.

"I wanted to use the guys' history as a kind of camera to take a photograph of what we saw in contemporary music in America," he continued. "I went to clubs, I listened to what people were listening to on their car radios. What I found out was that were about 10 beats out there. I thought, `Let's use them, but with detail, and high-level improvisation.' There was another angle, too, which was that, by now, a lot of people imitate us. I wanted to say, `Hey, we live here!' "

Probably no one person likes the whole range of what Metheny does, but there is a stylistic continuity that ties it all together, and that is melody.

Improvising a story

"I've always been the sort of improviser who likes to tell a story," he confessed. "So many guys, when they improvise, it's like sound bites - small, short phrases. My favorite was always Sonny Rollins, who hung with an idea."

Metheny's personal life reflects the same freshness and capacity for longevity as his approach to improvising. At 40, he still looks like the same enthusiastic teenager who was teaching at the Berklee School of music and playing with Gary Burton more than 20 years ago.

To stay in shape, Metheny runs. But his real secret, he said, is that he has never taken a drink of alcohol or smoked a cigarette in his life.

"It's not a moral thing," he explained. "I think people should do what they want to. But it's interesting how this has turned out. You know, I don't feel any different now than when I was 20."

Anyone who has seen Metheny knows he's not lying. His band usually plays three-hour shows. The touring group includes Mays, Steve Rodby (bass), Paul Wertico (drums), David Blamires (vocals), Mark Ledford (vocals, flugelhorn) and Luis Conte (percussion).

"We'd play for five hours if the audience would stay."