Sandy Brown Jazz

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Jazz As Art

Pat Metheny

That's The Way I Always Heard It Should Be

When you listen to music, you sometimes conjure images in your mind. Our Jazz As Art series invites you to listen to a piece of jazz and as it plays, scroll down the page and see which of the pieces of art I have chosen comes closest to the pictures in your mind. Hopefully, this will introduce you to recordings and art works you might not have spent time with before.

In his review of th album What's It All About for the BBC, Daniel Spicer said: 'Guitarist Pat Metheny is probably about as successful as a jazz musician gets to be these days. The winner of multiple Grammy Awards, with scores of recordings under his belt, he’s amassed a huge following for his brand of highly-polished, richly melodic fusion-lite. Ever easy on the ear, his is a kind of adult-oriented jazz, engineered to go down smooth .....What’s It All About is a solo acoustic guitar record. This thematic follow-up to the Grammy-winning 2003 solo release One Quiet Night contains 10 tracks drawn from pop and jazz, some very well known, and all chosen for their inherent melodic and harmonic properties. As Metheney puts it, "Every one of these tunes has something going on that is just hip on a musical level, no matter how you cut it." The majority of the tracks are performed on a specially tuned baritone guitar, which provides a sumptuous setting .... Indeed, the heart of this album is a string of intimate, unhurried tracks (recorded late at night in Metheny’s New York apartment) ... which Metheny gently nudges into subtly melodic extemporisations via small detours from the tune. Throughout, he seems supremely comfortable with the songs, trusting in their logic and form, allowing them to suggest their own stories'.

"To me, there were always several interesting things about this piece," Metheny says of Carly Simon's first major hit (That's The Way I Always Heard It Should Be), "not the least of which is the way that she moves from root minor key to the major key just a half step above it so effortlessly in a way that is almost invisible. But also, I always just thought it was a great melody, with that big leap at the end of the first phrase. And form wise, the way it goes through this whole thing and then starts back up again to make the same build again. My take on it harmonically colors in some of what I always thought was implied in there."

Here are the pictures I have chosen to go with the music. See what you think.