These new tunes, like their predecessors on the earlier trio records, will no doubt become modern jazz standards, much the way tunes like Bright Size Life and Question and Answer have become. Metheny says, "We finished our tour in Istanbul. We had two days off before we were going to convene in New York to record, so I locked myself in a room for a day, and thinking of all the things that I really loved about playing with Bill and Larry, wrote five new tunes. The tunes just flowed out. They are basically the kind of "blowing tunes" that set up a vibe where the improvisation has a context and a starting point, but can be played a million different ways from night to night. Also, for some reason, I have always loved the tune, I've Got a Lot of Livin' to Do from the musical Bye, Bye Birdie, so I wrote an arrangement of that one for those guys that honestly doesn't really have a lot to do with the original at this point, but sounds how I always imagined that tune sounding in this kind of a setting." Although Metheny has often recorded the music of the great jazz composer Ornette Coleman over the years, Trio 99>00 also offers something that Metheny watchers have never heard on one of his own albums; Metheny versions of compositions by two of the major saxophonist/composers of the 60's; Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane. "Capricorn is a Wayne Shorter tune that I have always loved but don't recall ever hearing anyone else play. Giant Steps is, of course, the John Coltrane composition that I think I have now heard everyone else play. It is simply one of the most inspiring pieces of musical architecture of the century. Usually I hear everyone kind of race through it, playing it really fast (the tune seems to really like that way of getting played) but my take on it here was to do more like the style of one of my own tunes, slower, with a little more opportunity to linger on the implications of each chord change. I added a bridge as a release device which kind of breaks it up some. Even though it's slower than usual here, I wanted it to have a sense of movement and that kind of wave-like thing that those chords suggest, so there is a lot of doubling up on the changes, even early on in the solo. But that is a tune you could play like a foxtrot and it would still be hip, there is just so much built into it." In recent years, with projects such as Beyond the Missouri Sky with Charlie Haden and his score for the recent, critically-acclaimed movie, A Map of the World, Metheny has continued to develop a sound on the acoustic guitar that is as distinctive as it is personal. There are three Metheny compositions that feature his excellent acoustic guitar playing on TRIO 99>00. "Each of the three acoustic guitar tunes are different. One of the best parts about playing with Larry and Bill is the stylistic range they have. Like a lot of younger players, style is just not an issue. I wanted to take advantage of that flexibility and write something that was quite different than the more swing-based grooves that most of the music was leaning towards. We had played a bunch of concerts in Italy (which is probably my favorite place on earth to play) and I wanted to write a piece that captured the beauty and joy of our week traveling around the country, playing gigs in these amazing places and that also had Larry and Bill playing in a very simple, almost folk-like way. That tune became Just Like The Day, a piece where the low note of the guitar is dropped down a whole step to D to give Larry and I a chance to form an ensemble part at the bottom that the tune is based on. We Had A Sister is a piece that I wrote for Joshua Redman's debut album, Wish. I had always wanted to record my own version of this tune and here it becomes almost like a piano trio version of the piece. Because of the dense harmonic structure of the tune, I found myself playing a lot of chords in the improvised section to keep the clarity of the structure intact-not something I am normally inclined to do, even in a trio. And Travels is simply one of my favorite tunes to come from the writing partnership that I have enjoyed for so many years with Lyle Mays. There has never been a studio recording of this tune - it only exists on the live record "Travels" - it happens to lay well on the guitar harmonically, and again, it is a groove that both Larry and Bill are fantastic at playing".