Recording of the Week, Pat Metheny - MoonDial

Sometimes in order to bring new ideas to life, you need to think outside the box – especially when its a six-stringed one known the whole world over. It can be as simple as tearing up the rulebook and starting all over, or in Linda Mazner's case, expanding on convention through simple modifications. 

Armed with his custom-built nylon-string baritone guitar courtesy of the Canadian master luthier, Pat Metheny has been taking the solo acoustic world by storm ever since he first sat down in his home studio over two decades ago to whittle away at some half-baked melodic ideas for his first proper (and most personal) all-night interaction with the instrument, in a recording dated 24th November, 2001.

Allow me to diverge slightly from the recording at hand, if I may, and spend a little bit of time unpicking Metheny’s famous ‘Altered Nashville’ tuning: Conventionally, the baritone guitar is tuned down a perfect fifth from its regular setup to A-D-G-C-E-A, appropriately known as ‘A Standard’. Pat left the bottom A & D at their low pitches whilst adjusting the middle G & C strings up an octave. His high E & A are pitched normally, with the instrument complemented on the whole by its wider bottom end register. Not only does this experimental calibration make for dense chord voicings (with there only being a minor 6th from the lowest to the highest pitch of the top four open strings), but it allows both close and wide interval spreads to be relatively easy for the player to grab, in a tuning that could only be achieved previously on a steel string guitar.

In any case, trying to replicate that unique tuning on a regular classical guitar would ultimately fail in a couple of ways. The smaller body wouldn't support the lowest fundamentals, for starters; its scale length would be too short. In rediscovering the Nashville tuning (first implemented on the tune ‘The Search’ from 1979’s American Garage) before applying it to his then recently-acquired Manzer baritone, Metheny was able to explore a tranquil selection of inviting, new moods, brought about through the intimate challenges of encountering harmonic pathways that were previously rendered impossible.

Around the time of One Quiet Night (2003), which won him the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album the following year, Metheny explained: “Basically, the guitar ends up being sort of like three, parallel two-string guitars… I was able to kind of keep these lines going that would ultimately need to shift to this other octave, an octave other than the way the lines would normally go.” As he would also state in the early nineties after his conceptual methodology left some Italian students less-than-impressed during an explosive seminar: “...I don't think in terms of substitutions [or] what scale fits what chord.”

This linear-based approach is key to the mellifluous fluidity of Metheny’s solo playing on MoonDial, his practical command of the fretboard radically altered through an abstract perspective now old enough to drink. Whilst famed the incomparable ambiance of his original compositions, including ‘Midwestern Nights Dream’, ‘If I Could’ and ‘As Wichita Falls, So Falls Wichita Falls’, his recent acoustic guitar recordings from this century have uncovered the freedom for the musician to apply creative musical concepts outside of his own material. Featuring a combination of original pieces inspired by the new instrument and standards – think Beatles, Chick Corea and Irish folk tunes – for which it is the perfect match, MoonDial is the latest milestone in Metheny's solo career; the summit of his transcendent amibition. Internally shifting, intelligently rebuilding, the music always remains loyal to an instrumentational foundation that's “three quarters of a string quartet”. Yet when Pat's unique jazz-country-blues voice comes together, the chords simply fall in between. 

Pat Metheny will perform at Symphony Hall in Birmingham on 14th November, the Barbican on 15th & 16th November (as part of the London Jazz Festival) and Saffron Hall in Cambridgeshire on 17th November.