This is one of many reasons that Pat Metheny will forever be one of my heroes.

http://metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/566/music.asp

This record in a lot of ways is a protest record. Lyle and I both feel completely out of step with the direction that the larger culture is moving in: a culture that’s about reducing things, placing less demands on listeners, and making things shorter. It went from a five-minute tune to a three-minute tune, to now you just have to have a ring tone. We reject that. That’s not an effective way of getting to a deeper point of understanding and the good things that we have found through our research in music that lead us to conclusions that are in fact enlightened or enhanced views of wisdom.

They don’t come through reduction, they come through nuance and detail and expansion and development. And there’s several hundred years of musical wisdom and truth that also support that. The general tendency of the culture to go for the most common denominator is something that with this record we’re fighting against ...

The tendency of jazz to become an academic music is one I resist with the same fervor I reserve for guys overdubbing themselves on a dead guy’s record. To me, they are both directions that will lead nowhere. Within the world of jazz there is a strong fundamentalist, neoconservative movement. In fact it parallels in amazing ways the political issues that involve fundamentalism and religious issues.

To me, the academic part is one that presupposes that it’s OK to go to this idealized, mythological version of what a form of music is. ‘Let’s put it in that box. That’s what it is, it’s done. If it doesn’t have the right key, it’s wrong.’ This would make jazz like baroque music or some kind of clearly defined form. To me it needs to remain malleable, so that each new generation can reinvent it using the found materials that are true to them, and can keep replenishing the supply.

The Way Up recently expanded the Metheny DVD collection. It's phenomenal.