Question and Answer

Pat: I posted the following review of your Nonesuch vinyl pressing of "What’s It All About?" to the Jazz Loft website for others to read (but wasn’t sure you’d visit that site yourself). I critically listened to this audiophile vinyl on my Well- Tempered Labs Reference turntable & Van den Hul Condor Platinum phono cartridge via Aesthetix amplification & JBL 4311 speakers, so the sound quality of the record was fully revealed. I should’ve printed this out & handed it to you at your Rollins College show, but forgot to. ripspace1@gmail.com RiP

https://www.jazzloft.com/p- 54171-whats-it-all-about-180g- 2-lp.aspx

1. Richard on 12/12/2011, said:

Superlative. Having seen Pat live in concert 2wice in very good venues with marvelous acoustics (the Maxwell C. King Center in Melbourne & the Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, FL), I know that no recording can with absolute faith capture the magic of this musician. Pat ’live’ is as good as music gets. He is a theory giant (no, he is whom the theory giants go to for advanced training), & develops some of the most tangential & explorative melody lines in Jazz, with some of the most interesting timing & emphases. He is a tone giant, & creates some of the most incandescent, creamy, spicy, guitar sounds I ever hear from Linda Manzer guitars (also played by Canadian, Bruce Cockburn, 1 of my other favorites). To me, Manzer guitars achieve 2 simultaneous & most-often not coincident sonic properties: They have a bright attack & a warm decay. Metheny invokes these properties to his advantage with authority & prowess in general, but with new levels of achievement on this German vinyl pressing, which comes closer to revealing the sonic spirit of his live performances than any other recording I own. Pat is an advanced technician on guitar, but his appeal surely includes more than technique. His musical spirit is a soaring, scintillating one of abstract aesthetic whose products are often well outside the mainstream. If you like that, as I do, then you never tire of it & he need never apologize for his wildly uncontained musical explorations. But with, "What’s It All About?" Pat returns to the familiar & brings a fresh & amazing treatment to the Standards he’s chosen to render via his unique approach to music, that should please even the most ’mainstream’ of listeners. He slows these tunes down & intimates them with wonderful care & sensitivity while imparting his deep tonal & melodic understanding to these songs to keep them from being ordinary in any way. He emotes the best sensations you will ever hear, & shows us again & again on this record what he is made of, & what these familiar Standards can really be in the hands of a loving master. Music is magic because music is analog. More than just revitalizing the ’Standards’ immortalized on this record, this very high-quality analog vinyl release will surely be held up as a sonic standard in audio shows for years to come. Thank you, Pat!

Hi Richard. Thank you so much for that review and all the nice compliments in there. I really appreciate it. Pat