For over three decades on the concert stage, the members of the GRAMMY® Award-winning Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, John Dearman, Matthew Greif, William Kanengiser, and Scott Tennant, have continually set the standard for expression and virtuosity among guitar ensembles, while perennially redefining themselves in their musical explorations.
These master musicians will present the west coast premiere of a new composition by Pat Metheny, Road to the Sun in a jazz-infused evening also featuring the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
“Road to the Sun” is a major new composition for four guitars by jazz guitar legend Pat Metheny, written for and dedicated to the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. Pat and LAGQ first spoke about a possible collaboration after an LAGQ concert at a guitar festival near Montana’s beautiful Glacier National Park. The next day, Pat visited the park, following the picturesque Going-to-the-Sun Road” while the musical possibilities of four nylon-string guitars ran through his imagination.
“It’s quite a journey up through some beautiful terrain,” says the LAGQ’s Bill Kanengiser, “so that must have stuck in his head when he finally started putting some ideas on paper.”
With “Road to the Sun,” Pat made a conscious decision to incorporate what has become his trademark style, but he also wanted to “reach for the narrative element of storytelling that is the imperative and primary function for me always as a musician.” He calls the new work an “emotional journey,” that took him “to a very personal area of what music itself is to me.”
While the 20-time Grammy winning guitarist is an inspiration to many guitar players across all genres, (LAGQ included a tribute to him on their Grammy Winning “Guitar Heroes” CD), he says he doesn’t really “spend a whole lot of time thinking about the instrument in a specific way.” And perhaps surprisingly, most of his composing work happens at the piano, which he calls “a much more forgiving and logical universe to write in than the odd geometry of guitar-thought.”
What he originally intended to be a 7 to 9-minute concert piece turned into a nearly 30-minute, six movement treatise on “what can happen in a multi-guitar format, blazingly inspired by the thought of hearing these four incredible guitarists play these notes. While there is a lot of my sensibility embedded in the notes, there is also a lot of room for each of them to bring their individual and collective identities to it as well.”
