Guitarist Pat Metheny is a seductive storyteller. During his career, his musical stories have been elaborately rendered with beauty and grace. Letter From Home (1989) comes to mind and is a stunning articulation of soft fusion and Brazilian music. I must have worn out several copies of the LP over the years. [Photo above of Pat Metheny]
Frankly, it's puzzling that the record hasn't been re-mastered and re-issued on 180-gram vinyl. In 1990, the album won the Grammy for Best Jazz Fusion Performance and sold a half-million copies by July 1998. It still sounds great.
Now, Pat has released MoodDial (BMG), a solo album. Here are his thoughts posted at his site:
Some years back, I asked Linda Manzer, one of the best luthiers [note: craftsperson who builds guitars] on the planet and one of my major collaborators, to build me yet another acoustic baritone guitar. But this time I wanted one with nylon strings as opposed to the steel string version that I had used on the records "One Quiet Night" and "What's It All About." [Photo above of Pat Metheny and Linda Manzer, courtesy of Linda Manzer]
My deep dive into the world of the baritone guitar began when I remembered that as a kid in Missouri, a neighbor had shown me a unique way of stringing where the middle two strings are tuned up an octave while the general tuning of the baritone instrument remains down a 4th or a 5th. This opened up a dimension of harmony that had been previously unavailable to me on any conventional guitar.
There were never really issues with Linda's guitar itself, but finding nylon strings that could manage that tuning without breaking or sounding like a banjo was difficult.
Just before we hit the road, I ran across a company in Argentina (Magma) that specialized in making a new kind of nylon string with a tension that allowed precisely the sound I needed to make Linda's baritone guitar viable in my special tuning.
It has happened to me a few times along the way where an instrument instantly peeled open a whole new range of possibilities. The initial moments spent with the Roland guitar synth of the late 1970s/early '80s comes to mind as another example.
Literally, minutes after finally finding nylon strings that could handle this tuning and placing them on the Manzer guitar, I again experienced one of those revelatory flashes.
There was suddenly a whole new palette of sound under my fingers, just like that.
This all occurred just three days before my tour was set to begin. But there was no doubt that this was something I could jump right into on the bandstand.
Across the first 50-plus concerts of the tour, I gradually introduced this new instrument. At first, it was just one tune. Then two. By the time the tour's first leg ended, Linda's nylon-string baritone guitar could be 20 or 25 minutes of the concert. It is a beautiful, rich, almost infinite feeling new world for me.
As soon as that first part of the tour went to break, I headed into the studio. I wanted to capture the magic of this new sound as quickly as possible and build on the immediate experiences that emerged from playing it every night for several months while it was all still fresh.
The result of this journey is this recording; "MoonDial."
The tracks:
- MoonDial
- La Crosse
- You’re Everything
- Here, There and Everywhere
- We Can’t See It, But It’s There
- Falcon Love
- Everything Happens To Me/Somewhere
- Londonderry Air
- This Belongs To You
- Shōga
- My Love And I
- Angel Eyes
- MoonDial (epilogue)
The album is a wondrous second-half-of-summer listen, as our thoughts begin to turn to autumn. Pat plays solo throughout on the baritone guitar, which requires him to find new ways to fill space with harmony as he works through the 12 pieces. It's this ruminative quality of Pat's artistry that grabs me. He makes you think.
PS: Moondials are time pieces similar to sundials. The most basic moondial is accurate only on the night of the full moon. More advanced moondials include charts showing the exact calculations to find the correct time, as well as dials designed with latitude and longitude. You're better off with a watch, but their antiquity has romantic merit.
JazzWax tracks: Pat Metheny's MoonDial (BMG) can be found here and on most major streaming platforms.
JazzWax clips: Here's the title track...
And here's Everything Happens to Me...
