Virtuoso guitarist Pat Metheny will be at the Nancy Jazz Pulsations festival on October 11 to present MoonDial, his new album.
Don't miss the concert of the distinguished jazz guitarist Pat Metheny on the occasion of his appearance at the Nancy Jazz Pulsations festival, on October 11. Tickets are available via the official website of the event.
A look back at the interview he gave to the editorial staff on the occasion of the release of his album MoonDial :
You present the pieces that make up this new album, MoonDial, as so many intense contemplations. What exactly should we understand?
It is clear that we are not going into 400 beats per minute and that we are far from Giant Steps (one of John Coltrane's most famous albums, editor's note). The idea is more to give the compositions the possibility to unfold, to spread out. It is a dimension that has always interested me. The album revolves around a fairly new idea for me, namely the association of a baritone guitar and nylon strings, which I have been chasing for years, in a way. This association encourages these contemplative moods, in a way.
Without going into technical details, what does the use of these nylon strings change?
They reinforce my feeling born with the way of conceiving the baritone guitar in solo on previous albums, One Quiet Night (2003) and What's It All About (2011), but which had been made with steel strings. It is no longer a guitar strictly speaking in my mind, but an instrument where the six strings go in groups of two: the two upper strings are a bit like a viola, the two in the middle like a classical violin and the two at the bottom are closer to a cello. For me it is a question of maintaining the lead theme between these groups of strings, as if I were facing a string quartet.
As with What's It All About, this new album features several covers, including Beatles covers: “And I Love Her” yesterday, “Here, There and Everywhere” here. What else can we learn from listening to the Beatles today?
It's just amazing how a lot of the Beatles songs have this consistency of quality, where you can sit back and do almost whatever you want to do with it. That's something they have in common with Thelonious Monk's compositions, to me. They have that presence no matter where you want to take them. That's what makes music standards; and the best Beatles songs, in my opinion, are right up there with Cole Porter's. Another reason many of us have tackled “Here, There and Everywhere” is that it calls for improvisation, for modulation between scales in a very interesting way. The absolute model for me in that area is “All the Things You Are.”
Find this interview with Pat Metheny in full in our issue 164, available on newsstands and via our online store.
