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What's It All About (180g 2-LP)
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180-gram audiopile pressing. Plated and pressed at Pallas, Diepholz, Germany.
With Pat Metheny, you simply never know what is coming next. But among the many things that make this ever changing artist so special is the astoundingly consistent level of commitment and quality that he brings to everything he does.
Whether purely acoustic or searingly electric, powerfully intense or deeply contemplative, highly composed or totally improvised, or even with some new fangled contraption of his own design, there is always that unmistakable Metheny sensibility at work that has stood at the forefront of jazz for what is now approaching four decades.
With “What’s It All About”, we have, yet again, another angle to consider in the Metheny oeuvre. After nearly 40 recordings under his own name, this is the first Metheny album where there is not a single Metheny composition represented. But far from being a “covers” album, this a personal view of ten classic songs, some very well known, some less so, filtered through the harmonic and melodic ideology of a modern master with a most individual approach.
Metheny sets the stage for this recording; “Almost ten years ago, in the fall of 2001, a special period in New York City, I was home one night and basically started playing in a way I never had thought about before. Like all of us living in the city around that time, I had a lot on my mind. I had just gotten some new recording equipment and set up a mic and turned it on. Six or seven hours later, I had a whole bunch of stuff recorded. Over the next few months while on a long tour I listened to it and realized that something unique had happened that night. I had gotten to some stuff that was quite different for me.”
Of course, the performances from that evening became the foundation for his Grammy winning album “One Quiet Night”. Metheny continues “I had owned a beautiful baritone guitar that (luthier) Linda Manzer had made for me a few years earlier, but I could never quite find what exactly to do with it. That night, I remembered a tuning that had been shown to me by a great local guitarist in my hometown of Lee’s Summit, Missouri back when I was in high school that required restringing and retuning the middle range of the guitar up one octave. I applied that to the baritone, and it was like the sky opened up with possibilities”.
“The recordings that came from that evening were an exploration into unknown territory for me, but in the almost 10 years since then, I have performed with the baritone in that tuning all over the world in what must be hundreds of concerts by now, often beginning each show solo with just that instrument. It has become a fairly significant new voice for me. While on tour, during the day once sound check is over, I often sit onstage and continue to play that instrument for hours before the show starts, on occasion picking out songs that I used to love as a kid but had never played in public. The range and timbre of the baritone with it’s deep bass and the unique clustery types of voicings that become possible with it lend it to a certain way of rethinking conventional harmonies.”
As the years went on Metheny got so many comments from promoters, crew and bandmates about those extended sound checks that it got him thinking. “Almost every day as I visited one well known tune or another to work through, various visitors or local crew people would come up to me and ask which record was my version of this tune or that tune that they recognized was on, and I would have to say that I had never made a record like that. And over the years, I have had it in the back of my mind that I actually should do a CD of some of some of those tunes at some point”.
With “What’s It All About”, that moment has arrived. Like it’s predecessor, these recordings were made late at night in his New York City home over a relatively short period of time. But with the choices of material represented in this collection this becomes something more. This is easily one of the most revealing and intimate records Metheny has ever made. |
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ARTISTS
Pat Metheny (solo baritone guitar) |
TRACKS
- The Sound of Silence
- Cherish
- Alfie
- Pipeline
- Garota De Ipanema
- Rainy Days and Mondays
- That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be
- Slow Hot Wind
- Betcha By Golly, Wow
- And I Love Her
- 'Round Midnight
- This Nearly Was Mine
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