Popcast: Pat Metheny and John Zorn\'s Surprising Mind-Meld

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Pat Metheny, left, and John Zorn collaborated on an album for Nonesuch Records.

This week: Nate Chinen, a jazz critic for The Times, talks to host Ben Ratliff about Pat Metheny's new album, “Tap: John Zorn's Book of Angels, Vol. 20.”

Pat Metheny - whose jazz-fusion records of the 1970s and '80s helped him become one of the most popular improvisers of the last 40 years - plays the music of John Zorn, defiant anticommercial avant-gardist, et cetera. Of course, there's much more to both artists than those reductive labels. Does this album help crack open those perceptions and neutralize them?

The album can be surprising: Mr. Metheny, playing everything but drums, commits to rigorous, varied, sometimes wild versions of Mr. Zorn's “Book of Angels” pieces, all of which use the modes and scales associated with traditional Jewish music. Do the old cliques and cabals around jazz and improvised music still make any sense? Despite the fact that they had barely met until recently, are Mr. Metheny and Mr. Zorn, as methodical, creative minds, more alike than had been thought?

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Nate Chinen's interview with John Zorn and Pat Metheny.

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
Tracks by artists discussed this week. (Spotify users can also find it here.)