‘You find yourself wondering if there’s anything new under the sun’

Last week, I was watching a concert in the RiverCenter for the Performing Arts with my 17-year-old son. After a song, if you could call it that, we’d turn to each other and one of us would ask, “What was that?”

We were listening to Pat Metheny, a 62-year-old jazz guitarist and a recent inductee into the Downbeat Hall of Fame, whatever that means. He’s also the only person to win Grammys in 10 categories, so he’s kind of hard to categorize.

Metheny first took the stage alone with what looked like a small spaceship. It was his custom Pikasso I 42-string guitar.

I only know it was a custom Pikasso I 42-string guitar because I just looked it up on the internet. I know nothing about guitars. It had two necks with frets and strings and then another set of strings angling across those, and then something at the bottom of the body that looked like an autoharp.

After a while, Metheny traded the spaceship for what looked more like a guitar, and he was joined by Mexican-American drummer Antonio Sanchez – who a couple of years ago composed the score for the Oscar-winning movie “Birdman” – as well as Linda Oh, a Malaysian-Australian bassist, and Gwilym Simcock, a British pianist.

I can’t describe what they did for the next 135 minutes, or the music they made.

Metheny was right in the middle of everything, which is what you want if you’re paying more than 50 bucks to see somebody famous. A couple of years ago, I paid about that much to see a Ricky Skaggs Family Christmas, and Skaggs, one of the world’s greatest mandolin players, sat on a stool and shook the tambourine.

Boo.

Not Metheny. He played with his quartet, and then he strolled around the stage and improvised with each one of them individually, like a Mister Rodgers with really big hair stopping to chat with the various colorful characters in his neighborhood.

He played a whole bunch of guitars. He played one called a Roland GR-300 Synthesizer, which sounded like a trumpet. There was no singing, but when he hit high notes and got the thing to screaming, he’d open his mouth and it looked like the music was coming straight out of his lungs.

Then he sat and played a shiny acoustic. The lights dimmed and a spotlight shone from the rafters, the beam caroming off the guitar and setting individual faces in the audience on fire.

The guitar moved as he played and the fire jumped from face to face.

I didn’t understand what I was seeing or hearing, which wasn’t surprising. I grew up in a house with a piano, but can only play “Heart and Soul.”

The son next to me plays trombone, piano, guitar, bass and mandolin, and he didn’t understand any of it either.

It reminded me of reading to a 5-year-old boy at the now-defunct Muscogee Elementary School. His eyes would light up whenever he saw pictures of snakes in stories.

So I took out my phone and showed him YouTube videos of mongooses fighting cobras, and I’ll never forget his reaction: shock and wonder. A whole new world was opening up to him.

Like anybody my age, I’ve seen a lot of stuff and done a lot of stuff. Even teenagers these days are like that.

You find yourself wondering if there’s anything new under the sun.

And then – Bam! – there we were Saturday night, thinking we’re going to do something interesting and pleasant, and all of a sudden we’re two little kids watching a mongoose fight a cobra.

That doesn’t happen much, and I’m going to try to hang on to it.

This story was originally published February 3, 2017 at 8:05 PM with the headline "‘You find yourself wondering if there’s anything new under the sun’."