Metheny to Include 21st Century Sound in Universal Show

The first song of the 21st century has arrived. And it can be found inside the latest Pat Metheny Group album.

The tune, cryptically titled “The Roots of Coincidence,” is a sonic roller coaster, a haunting melange of musical styles and technology, blending seamlessly the drama of orchestral music with cutting-edge electronics. As a noisy climax of electric guitars, acoustic percussion and drum machines subsides, it is replaced by a lilting melody, played on an electric 12-string guitar that’s tuned within the same octave and a half.

Metheny is particularly proud of the “Coincidence” track, released on “Imaginary Day,” his first album for Warner Brothers Records. And he will be sure to include it in the group’s show Friday at the Universal Amphitheatre.

“That piece could certainly not have existed until right now,” he said in a telephone interview from New York. “Whenever we touch on that feeling, we feel we’ve fulfilled our obligation as musicians: trying to reconcile a number of issues that are important to us.

“There’s a bunch of things about ‘Coincidence’ that are very particular to this time, and yet, you have to be familiar with the be-bop style in order to solo on the tune.”

Fortunately, Metheny will showcase many of the new album’s compositions during Friday’s show. Arguably the most complex and consistently brilliant record in the band’s career, “Imaginary Day” found the guitarist and his co-composer, keyboardist Lyle Mays, allowing themselves to take new chances.

“After an afternoon of working on the title track for the album, Lyle and I had to stand back and say: ‘Well, it seems that we’re writing a Chinese opera blues with a fretless guitar.’ It was almost like composing by free association,” he said. “And there may have been a point earlier in the band where we would have been uncertain. This time, we just kept going.”

The results are a slap in the face to jazz purists who have consistently dismissed the group’s output as something more closely related to elevator music than to Miles Davis.

Truth be told, it is difficult to categorize Metheny’s music as jazz. In 1984, he became enamored of Brazilian jazzy pop and released “First Circle,” the first of many albums with tunes supported by percolating, Latin-style percussion and breezy, wordless vocals.

This lightness of spirit, though, never betrayed Metheny’s tendency toward highly charged guitar combustion. On a variety of side projects, collaborating with greats such as Ornette Coleman, John Scofield and, most recently, bassist Charlie Haden, he has shown his more jazzy side. His projects with the group, of course, are the most consistently commercial.

But Metheny is the last man to judge his own output.

“Anybody who makes a record is a commercial artist,” he said. “Besides, our perception of music is volatile, fickle and totally liquid. When it came out, my first album sold 1,300 copies. Today, it’s considered an important record of the ‘70s.”

That album, “Bright Size Life,” launched Metheny’s career and led to a string of memorable records for the sophisticated ECM label, including “American Garage” and the masterful, impressionistic “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls.”

By the late ‘80s, the group was ready for mainstream success, and switched to Geffen Records, losing a bit of the sobriety of style that characterized the ECM years. But the live shows became more dramatic and elaborate, as the years of playing together with the same core band (Metheny, Mays, Steve Rodby on bass and Paul Wertico on drums) led to an onstage synergy that continues to be fascinating.

On a personal level, “Imaginary Day” finds the guitarist in good spirits. “I’ve settled into a more civilian life, with an apartment in New York where I actually have a fridge and a stereo,” he said with relief. “For the last seven years, my life was completely nomadic. . . . I loved every minute of it.”

BE THERE

Pat Metheny’s group plays at 8:15 p.m. Friday at the Universal Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, (818) 622-4440. Tickets are $15-$50.