Well, we’ve just got back from the Pat Metheny “Speaking of Now” concert at the House of Blues in Mandalay Bay. The House Of Blues is a good venue – if you have good seats. Unfortunately, ours were terrible. We deliberately chose seats from the upstairs price range because the last couple of times we’ve been to a concert there, the stalls/downstairs is standing only. Well, it turned out they’d set up folding seats on the floor, so that would have been fine.

Also, we must have bought our tickets from a complete drongo behind the counter because our supposedly more expensive seats were actually off to the side and we could only see half the band! The venue has these two big video screens, but even then you still only see what they chose to display on them at any given time.

The music, however, was excellent. That Pat Methany, he can play guitar. A whole other league of musicianship.

He played a variety of guitars, mostly his Ibanez signature model (http://www.ibanez.com/pm/) or one of his three (!) Roland GR-300 synth guitars which are practically antiques now. At one point he had a 42-string acoustic harp guitar which sounded astounding. I found a picture of it here (scroll down): http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/5886/met_stru.html.

I would write more about this concert, but I’ve just found this concert review on-line which says it all better than I could: http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~astudent/2001-2002/issue19/arts/04.html.