Beyond the Missouri Sky - guitarist Pat Metheny and bassist Charlie Haden's acoustic duets on materials from a shared mid-west past - was a surprise hit by the standards of jazz record sales when it appeared in 1997. Though miles away from smooth jazz in its avoidance of repeating grooves and licks, the album's appeal lay in its loping country songs, its quiet lyricism, and the duo's ability to improvise lines that almost always sound like songs, however far from the source they get.
The Barbican performance opened a European tour of this material, which they have only played live a handful of times since the disc was released. Their long set occasionally suggested a gap between the fluent inventiveness of the original session and this 2002 live version, but it was a pleasure to hear these elegant jazz melodists together in person.
The audience also greeted the performance, as houses for the Barbican's jazz seasons usually do, with the warmth that sets grateful respect for long careers devoted to music (rather than ego or economics) alongside responses to the show itself.
Yet Metheny, one of the most melodically prolific of jazz improvisers, did occasionally sound as if the responsibilities of performing improvised acoustic music from a long-past project in a concert hall for 90 minutes was causing him uncharacteristic doubts.
He opened alone, with a soft chordal ballad on orthodox acoustic guitar, then moved on to a multi-fingerboard instrument that allowed him to echo the sounds of bouzoukis or oriental instruments, and mimic a double bass's deep boom simultaneously.
Then the real bassist arrived, and Haden's supple counter-melodic walk was soon purring beneath the guitarist on the first of the Missouri Sky album's evocative country-music harmonies and poignant themes.
Haden's gliding Waltz for Ruth, Jimmy Webb's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Ennio Morricone's Cinema Paradiso theme all brought passages of close interplay and individual lyricism from the duo, while Metheny's eloquent Message to a Friend, a typical confection of wistful melody and plangent chords, was a reminder of just how many memorable songs the guitarist has brought to the sometimes melodically perfunctory world of jazz.
Neither the dynamic level nor the tempo lifted much in the first 45 minutes, but Metheny's Bill Frisell-like electronic textures against Haden's arco bass, and the swinging electric guitar feature Blues for Pat, snapped the music out of its reverie. Lovely themes, currently rather hesitantly developed, but the later stages of the tour will almost certainly see that change.
