eJazzNews Archive

Jazz Legends Pat Metheny Group Improvise on Austin City Limits

Originally published on eJazzNews · · Press Releases

On January 17, 2003, eJazzNews published the announcement that the Pat Metheny Group would close the 28th season of the PBS series Austin City Limits, in an episode first broadcast on January 25, 2003. The band was promoting Speaking of Now, the album that a few weeks later won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Jazz Album.

What the announcement said

The press release, which ran in the eJazzNews press releases section, pointed out that the Pat Metheny Group had been together almost as long as Austin City Limits had been on the air, since its creation in 1977. It said the group had won Grammy Awards for seven consecutive releases and was nominated in three categories at the upcoming 45th Grammy Awards.

On Speaking of Now, the release explained, Metheny, his longtime pianist and co-composer Lyle Mays and bassist and co-producer Steve Rodby were joined by three new members: drummer Antonio Sanchez, trumpeter Cuong Vu and singer Richard Bona. Metheny talked about the band’s long run of “extended research” into what the jazz tradition could hold, and about the particular pressure a recording puts on improvisers, whose music, he said, normally just disappears once it is played. The episode, produced like the rest of the series by KLRU-TV in Austin, included “Proof,” “As It Is,” “How Insensitive,” “The Gathering Sky,” “In Her Family,” “Bright Size Life” and “On Her Way.”

Speaking of Now and the Grammys

Speaking of Now was released by Warner Bros. on February 12, 2002, as the group’s tenth studio album, produced by Metheny with Mays and Rodby. It reached number one on Billboard’s contemporary jazz albums chart, and at the 2003 Grammy Awards it won Best Contemporary Jazz Album. The band had first won with Offramp and went on to collect Grammys for albums including Still Life (Talking). Wikipedia’s list of Grammy records counts ten awards for the group; Metheny himself has 20 and is the only person to have won Grammys in ten different categories.

What happened next

Richard Bona left after the 2002 tour to concentrate on his own career, though he returned as a guest on the group’s final album, The Way Up (Nonesuch, 2005), a single 68-minute piece on which harmonica player Grégoire Maret joined the band. The Pat Metheny Group was active until 2010. Lyle Mays, who wrote and arranged nearly all of the group’s music with Metheny, died in Los Angeles on February 10, 2020, at the age of 66. Metheny has continued to lead other bands and solo projects. For more on him, see our guide to the greatest jazz guitarists, and for the style the group belonged to, our guide to jazz fusion.

Where to start listening

  • Speaking of Now (Warner Bros., 2002): the album the band was promoting when it played Austin City Limits.
  • Still Life (Talking) (Geffen, 1987): one of the group’s Grammy-winning albums.
  • The Way Up (Nonesuch, 2005): the group’s last studio album.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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