Grammy Award winning jazz guitarist Pat Metheny announces Aus return

The 20 time Grammy winner is returning to Australia for the first time in six years.

Pat Metheny’s impressive international touring schedule continues to grow, with the American jazz guitarist slotting in a select trio of Australian tour dates for Autumn 2020.

‘An Evening With Pat Metheny’ gives Australian fans the opportunities to see him present a wide and all-encompassing collection of music from a career that has stretched over 40 years. The tour out this way is only the third for Metheny, who previously visited Australia in 2014 and before that, in 1984, so there’s a lot of catching up to do.

The tour won’t just be a walk down memory lane, with Metheny noting that he’s got new music in the works too. Whether or not he’ll be rolling large amounts of it out during the tour is still up in the air but as it goes with jazz, every night is different.

“I have already written a bunch of new music which we record and will be released early 2020,” he says. “I like the idea of keeping it open and letting it become what it winds up being over the course of a tour.”

The Australian tour will see Metheny perform in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney in March, where he will be joined by drummer Antonio Sanchez, bassist Linda May Han Oh and pianist Gwilym Simcock.

Check out Pat Metheny live:

Having collaborated with Sanchez multiple times over the years, Metheny already has a solid dynamic with the drummer. Yet working Han Oh and Simcock into this trio format provides an exciting opportunity to improvise and expand.

“At this stage, I have so much music and it all is kind of one big thing for me without borders or distinctions between this period or that period. With Antonio, Linda and Gwilym, I think we could and will do a wide range of thing from throughout all of it – and maybe uncover what the next period has in store as well.”

Since making his debut back in the mid-1970’s, Pat Metheny has been recognised by many as a leader is in the jazz world for his reinvention of the ‘traditional’ jazz guitar sound, which has gone on to influence younger generations of players today.