Pat Metheny: The Inspiration Behind “MoonDial” – Exclusive Jazz Guitar Today Interview

In this exclusive JGT interview, Joe Barth talks to Pat Metheny about “MoonDial”, a new album of solo guitar pieces performed on a custom nylon string guitar.

Above photo: Jimmy Katz

MoonDial is a new album of solo guitar pieces performed on a custom nylon string guitar built for Pat Metheny by Canadian luthier Linda Manzer. In all of Pat’s career, he has explored new musical territory and this instrument with a unique tuning has given him uncharted musical terrain to explore artistically.  In this article, we talk about his values and curiosities in making this album.

---

JB:  All three of your solo guitar albums are wonderful.  Describe your goals with One Quiet Night then What’s It All About and then how the aesthetic of MoonDial fits into that sequence.

PM:  Solo guitar playing was not something that came up much for me along the way. There was an early track on Watercolors called Icefire that was the first instance of a pure solo piece, and that was on a 12-string guitar with only high E and B strings tuned in 4ths and 5ths. Maybe that set the stage for what was to come later with another odd guitar configuration with a baritone guitar.

The thing about baritone guitars is that we all seem to eventually want to get one, but there isn’t really a lot of utility for them beyond the tic-tac bass double and the cool thing of sitting on the couch and hearing that deeper sound and stuff coming back at you in different keys than you are used to.

Honestly, I really didn’t know what I was doing for the most part. In any case, I took that long bunch of stuff and listened to it across the next day or so, found my favorite parts, and then recorded a couple more things, this time some tunes too. That became the record One Quiet Night.

Suddenly there was a new platform for me there. Across the next years, I would play a tune or two here and there solo on Linda’s baritone. Eventually, I really learned it. That led to a second solo baritone record What’s It All About which was the first time I had ever done a record of only other people’s music. 

JB: With this guitar, you use a unique tuning with a couple of strings pitched extremely high.  Tell us about this instrument and how it makes you think differently about how to play it.

PM:  Nashville tunings have been a part of my thing almost from the beginning. I wrote a tune for Gary Burton’s band in the early 1970’s called “Phase Dance” with a Nashville strung Guild guitar I had an idea so I could switch back and forth with my 175 and made a stand for the Guild from a few clamps from a hardware store, a 2×4, and a cymbal stand. Gary thought it was nuts until he heard it, then agreed to let me bring it out for a week at a club. That became a thing for me when started my own band and I started concerts like that for years. Later some company started making stands like that which was kind of cool.

A neighbor in Missouri once told me the only way a baritone guitar “works” is to tune the middle two strings up an octave, hence a “half Nashville” tuning. That way you avoid all the major and minor 3rds below middle C that are just too muddy for most human musical consumption.

Linda Manzer is well known to be one of my most important musical collaborators. She had made her first baritone guitar for a fantastic NY guitarist named Craig Snyder. When I played Craig’s, I asked her to make one just like it for me too. Once I got it, I sat on the couch, was digging it as noted above, and also as noted, realized I had very little practical application for it.

I remembered the “two middle strings up an octave = 1/2 Nashville” thing, grabbed an 0.10 and an 0.18 and put them on the 3rd and 4th strings. It was an instant thing; like a new musical universe that was both familiar and totally unfamiliar at the same time opened up for me in a split second. I happened to have a very rudimentary recording setup with a stereo mic and the internal (Fishman) DI sitting there. I hit record and then played for about 6 hours off and on across a single evening.

What I came to understand was that this system was less like a guitar than an instrument that was actually three two-stringed instruments that just happened to be sitting right next to each other; the top two strings being in the viola range, the middle two strings being in the violin range, and the bottom two strings being in the cello range.

The best results seemed to occur when I was thinking in those terms and keeping the voice leading in each “section” consistent within itself. And of course, that kind of thinking invokes something more along the lines of classical orchestration, which then naturally invokes classical guitar, or at least a nylon string sound.

So, I asked Linda to make a nylon string baritone for me and she did, a beautiful instrument. But in this tuning, it was almost impossible to find strings that could get to the three-two-string-instrument thing that was easily achieved on the steel string. I tried everything and either broke everything or wound up with something that sounded more like a banjo than what I hoped for to balance with the lush low register. 

Watch for the Linda Manzer JGT interview later this month.

This past year, just before heading out on a year-long solo tour in response to a very different kind of “solo” record (Dream Box is a record of double-tracked solo electric guitar playing), I happened to run across a video that introduced new nylon strings made by Magma in Argentina that were designed for extreme pitch ranges with the aim of keeping close to normal tension. I ordered a whole bunch of their stuff on Amazon and got it the next day, the day before the tour was to start. 

I put them on Linda’s guitar and suddenly within this already alternate universe of baritone stuff, a new world appeared apparently ready to go. The first night of the tour I played one tune on that axe, then the next night two, and then it became a central destination for me across the next fifty-plus nights of concerts around the states. 

There was a break at that point in the tour for a few weeks between the US part and the Japanese part. While it was all still fresh and new for me, I decided to lock myself away with the nylon baritone somewhere upstate and record the tunes I had been doing in the concerts plus picks from the thirty or so pieces I had found as suitable candidates during sound checks and days off in hotel rooms. (Yes, I was so into this new thing that even in the midst of a long tour I would take the thing home or on the bus with me to see what else might be lying in wait there for me) The result of all this is the MoonDial record.

---

JB:  We know the challenges and fears of a solo guitar performance and how everything rests on you, the guitarist.  But tell us about the unique joys and rewards you have discovered in your solo guitar performances.

PM:  I will admit to trepidation when I agreed to do a tour like this. I had never done a whole year just by myself unless you count the Orchestrion project, which was also solo but in a very unique kind of way. But my idea was that on this tour I would look at all the different ways I had made solo records over the years. There is quite a range of things, from the first strumming-type stuff on New Chautauqua to Zero Tolerance for Silence to the baritone stuff and all else, plus the obvious conventional guitar stuff that I might come up with. The fact that I was kind of scared was good. That is maybe my favorite spot to be in.

Nevertheless, it is an evening where it is me sitting there with a guitar of some type by myself for over two hours in front of often thousands of people. But to my surprise, after I got over the hurdle of the first ten concerts or so and settled into it, I have to say it has become one of my favorite things to do and I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity. It has been an incredible period of growth for me.

Really most everything I have done in my life as a musician has been under the banner of “bandleader” – but a bandleader who also is going to be the person who is going to write the music. My main job has been finding musicians who were qualified and capable of achieving the kind of result for whatever music I happen to be writing or conceiving of at a particular time and then doing records and touring that reflects that period, whatever it may be. 

And in a lot of ways, this tour is similar. It’s just that in this case, I am the bandleader of a band where I am the only one in it. In the case of this guitar, my job as “bandleader” for this project was to find tunes that allow it to shine at its best, just like I always have tried to do with the people I have hired to be in my various groups over the years.

JB:  I know you wanted to express your own voice as a solo guitarist, but can you tell us about a couple of solo guitar albums that have inspired you as a guitarist and why? 

PM:  I know I am a guitar player and everything, but it isn’t a priority for me as a destination. I am not sure if that makes sense, but my first response to your question is to say Glenn Gould – his playing could be the aspirational model for me in a setting like this in terms of a bunch of things. The whole idea of touch is a big thing for me, even too on electric. That is a subtle area of music-making and an unlikely subject for analysis in a way because it is hard to define and break down. It mostly has to do with internal dynamics and the way one shapes a phrase. I spend a lot of time working on how to play so each note has a certain kind of meaning in relation to what came just before and just after so when I am improvising, hopefully that kind of feeling can come out.

But to be guitar-specific to your question, Paco De Lucia and Vicente Amigo are heroes in this area for me. Of course, the fancy stuff, but especially the adagio-type stuff that typically sets up the more burning stuff in their performances. And in our general community, Joe Pass remains in a class utterly by himself. And Ted Greene too.

To me, Jason Vieaux is one of the great solo players in history. I saw a Bach performance of his some years back that is one of the best musical evenings as a listener I have ever experienced. 

There is also some great Derek Bailey solo stuff out there. I always liked Keiji Haino. Many others too. And there are plenty of guys who are great stepping out by themselves for a tune or two in almost every category in addition as an adjunct to their ensemble playing.

JB:  What drew you to “Chick Corea’s “You’re Everything” from his Light as a Feather album?

PM:  I miss Chick so much. In many ways, he was the backbone of our community as a bandleader/composer. He wrote so much music that is loved and played by so many musicians. Maybe only Monk has more tunes that so many people know and love and play regularly. That tune has always been one of my favorites of his. It has a very unique way of thinking of a descending bass line in a non-diatonic way and is just a great melody. I wanted to do it as a tribute to him.

---

JB:  I love how you have treated the Beatles’ song “And I Love Her” and now you include “Here, There and Everywhere.”  What do you find so rewarding in these Lennon and McCartney songs?

PM:  The Beatles have always represented creativity at a high level to me. The best of their tunes meet the highest standards of what a song can be, not unlike the greatest standard tunes in the so-called Great American Songbook.

There is a reason “standards” become standards. A really great composition allows all kinds of approaches to it while still retaining its shape and spirit. The best Beatles tunes have that the same way the best “standards” do.

---

 JB:  I could go on and on asking about every song on the album but let me ask one more.  I love your pairing of “Everything Happens to Me” with “Somewhere” from West Side Story.  Was it Frank Sinatra’s 1957 rendition of “Everything…” with a string orchestra that prompted you to pair it with the ethereal “Somewhere?” 

PM:  Both are songs that I really like that I found had a home within the range and strengths of the baritone nylon. Each night on tour I would pick a standard or two or three and kind of wrap them together. Those two worked really well together one night and so I gave it a shot for the record.

JB:  All of your original compositions on MoonDial are wonderful and have their own unique characteristics.  But one more question about a song, I love the textural contrast of “Shoga” with the strumming.  Talk about this song of yours.

PM:  That may be the one on the record I was least sure of. The word is the Japanese word for ginger, like the ginger you get when you go to a sushi bar to eat between pieces to clear the palate. I felt like I needed at least one thing on there that was a very different technique, and the strumming thing worked well on the steel string on pieces like Song for the Boys and Pipeline on the earlier records. I am not really sure that the instrument particularly liked getting beat on like that, but it did work well to break the program up a little.

---

JB:  Is there anything you can say about what is next for you as a solo guitarist?

PM:  It is cool to have this whole other thing. I went for probably thirty-plus years of gigs without ever playing solo for more than a few bars at a time. So, there is a real sense of progress to be able to do entire concerts like this now. And I love not having to worry about other off-the-bandstand stuff. A huge part of my life as bandleader has seen all kinds of sometimes challenging behaviors coming and going and having to adjust to the day-to-day stuff of other people. With this, I know how to prepare each day for it and can get out there and take care of business. That said, occasionally some nights are better than others for kind of elusive and almost unknowable reasons. I keep trying to figure out what makes the okay nights better and the really good nights even better. 

Some folks have asked if I am going to stay in a zone like this since there now have been two records in a row that in different ways have been about just the guitar. The answer is no – I have what I think is one of the best records I have ever made almost done with my current band of young dudes, and another almost-done record also that is focused on what I guess would be called more straight-ahead type stuff of the more burning variety. I always have a whole bunch of other ideas with less time than I need to get to. There’s lots more to come.

---

Subscribe to Jazz Guitar Today – it’s FREE!

Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!