Pat Metheny's new album, What's It All About, is out tomorrow. To start the count down to the big day, we posted the first in a series of videos on Friday of Metheny performing songs off the new record. Now comes the second video in the series: "Garota de Ipanema" ("Girl from Ipanema") by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. Watch it here.
Pat Metheny's latest Nonesuch album, What's It All About, is out tomorrow. To start the count down to the big day, we posted the first in a series of videos on Friday of Metheny performing songs on the new record, with Carly Simon's "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," which you can watch at nonesuch.com/media. Now comes the second video in the series: "Garota de Ipanema" ("Girl from Ipanema") by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, posted below.
"People are often surprised to hear that this is one of the first songs I ever learned, but any beginning guitar student knows about the dreaded F chord: the first time you are asked to 'barre' two strings together with one finger," Metheny recalls. "For me, in that first week of playing the instrument, it was impossible to make my fingers do that. But by leaving the top string open and not doing the barre, you wind up with an F major seventh chord, which somehow I recognized as being the first chord of the tune I had just heard Astrud Gilberto sing with Stan Getz on TV around that time. I actually liked it better than the straight F chord anyway!"
Watch the performance here and at nonesuch.com/media:
After nearly 40 recordings under his own name, this is the first Pat Metheny album where there is not a single Metheny composition represented. This is a personal view of ten classic songs, some very well known, some less so, filtered through the harmonic and melodic ideology of a modern master with a most individual approach.
Check back with the Nonesuch Journal tomorrow for another video in the series.
To reserve a copy of What's It All About on CD in the Nonesuch Store, click here; for vinyl, due out June 28, click here. All pre-orders include a limited-edition print signed by Metheny, plus a free instant download of the album track "Alfie" at checkout and high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s of the album starting release day.
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