4/23/2021 0 Comments Best Of Pat Metheny
The definitive version is on his 2000 trio album, alongside bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Bill Stewart.Photograph: Brian RasicRex Photograph: Brian RasicREX Pat Metheny nothing if not versatile.
Photograph: Brian RasicRex Photograph: Brian RasicREX John Lewis Tue 12 Aug 2014 08.28 EDT Last modified on Tue 14 Feb 2017 14.10 EST 1 And I Love Her (live) Metheny was inspired to pick up a guitar by the Beatles, watching A Hard Days Night 15 times as an 11-year-old. By the age of 14 hed heard Wes Montgomery and consciously rejected rock music for jazz. Its taken him a few decades to reconnect with his first love, and many of his recent albums feature elegant reworkings of his favourite pop songs. This is a gorgeous, bossa-tinged, reverb-drenched version of Paul McCartneys ballad, caressed on a nylon-strung acoustic and inspired by Al Di Meolas version. Bright Size Life Metheny was a teenage prodigy. A few months into a music course at the University of Miami, the music department realised that he was already a better guitarist than anyone on the staff and gave him a teaching job when he was only 17. In 1973, aged 19, he was a faculty member at the prestigious Berklee School of Music. A year later, he was recruited by the vibraphone virtuoso Gary Burton. His first LP as a leader is a spartan, noisy trio session grounded by Jaco Pastoriuss grinding fretless bass, while drummer Bob Moses flails entertainingly behind them. Methenys trademark tone clean, frictionless and sustained with a touch of digital delay is already evident. As Falls Wichita After touring with Joni Mitchells heavyweight jazz band and recording a straight-ahead jazz album with Michael Brecker, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden, Metheny defied expectations with an ambient album. As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls is officially a duet album with keyboardist Lyle Mays with Metheny overdubbing assorted guitars and basses while Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos adds some crucial textures on assorted African, Indian and Latin American percussion. This lengthy opening track, which takes up the entire first side of the LP, is a spine-tingling palimpsest of ghostly conversations, sepulchral organ chords, zither-like guitars and folksy melodies. Are You Going With Me It was on 1982s Offramp that Metheny really developed his facility for writing a killer pop hook. Are You Going With Me has since become something of an anthem, a song with which hell often end his shows. Written by Metheny and Mays on a Synclavier, it features a lengthy solo from Metheny on a Roland GR-300 guitar synthesiser, first (from 206) sounding like a harmonica and then (from 345) then like a particularly nimble Stylophone. Metheny also reworked the song 20 years later with the Polish singer Anna Maria Jopek as part of the Upojenie project as a kind of electronic world-music groove. ![]() The highlight of the album was this undeniably infectious piece, set to a chugging drum pattern and featuring Metheny on a treated guitar that resembles a sitar. The melody and chord changes are strong enough to sustain repetition in other contexts Metheny would revive it for solo acoustic guitar on the 2003 album One Quiet Night but its this relentless version that would end up being used for numerous US TV advertisements, radio theme tunes and as incidental film music. Tell Me Where Youre Going (with Silje) This 1990 collaboration with Norwegian singer Silje Nergaard was only a minor hit in the UK (hanging around the lower reaches of the chart for much of 1990 before peaking at No 55 in January 1991), but it went to No 1 in Japan, top five in Norway and top 10 in dozens of other territories. ![]() It wasnt his first flirtation with the singles chart: Methenys biggest hit was a 1985 collaboration with David Bowie, This Is Not America, the theme to the The Falcon and the Snowman, which reached No 14 on the UK chart. Zero Tolerance for Silence, Part IV of V Methenys first foray into the punkjazz continuum comes with the enthusiastic endorsement of Sonic Youths Thurston Moore emblazoned on the cover. Zero Tolerance for Silence is split into five parts and sees Metheny overdubbing layer upon layer of guitar, adding a rare distortion to his tone. Part IV is a straightforward boogie thats played as a chorale: each layer of guitar arrives four bars after the last, until theres more than a dozen separate guitar parts being played simultaneously. You half expect Captain Beefheart to start grunting halfway through. Metheny continues to dip into noisenik territory 1996s collaboration with the Yorkshire avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey, The Sign of Four (Knitting Factory) is an unremittingly intense three-CD set. Sadly, none of it is on YouTube. Giant Steps As a rejoinder for those who doubt Methenys jazz chops, here he is playing a wonderfully spacious, bossa-tinged version of Coltranes classic.
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