Filmed at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, but the audio is obviously from a studio recording. This video has just the music.
"At the time of the song's recording, Latin American and especially Brazilian music had begun to influence jazz in the United States, and when Brazilian musicians such as Nana Vasconcelos came to play with American artists, this influence, in the case of the Pat Metheny Group, became overt. The "Brazilian" quality of "Are You Going With Me?" is frequently noted; and it has been considered by some to be "obviously samba-based"."
Interesting story about Pat Metheny: "While playing at a club in Kansas City, he was approached by Bill Lee, a dean at the University of Miami, and offered a scholarship. After less than a week at college, Metheny realized that playing guitar all day during his teens had left him unprepared for classes. He admitted this to Lee, who offered him a job to teach instead, as the school had recently introduced electric guitar as a course of study."
He is apparently the only artist ever to win Grammy Awards in ten different categories.
A more recent performance, with the Metropole Orkest (Netherlands jazz/pop orchestra):
Nice to see PMG here, Stan. I’ve been aware of Pat and keyboardist Lyle Mays since their early days, but became a huge fan of the Pat Metheny Group in the 80’s. There has never been a finer jazz ensemble for my money, and I was fortunate to see them several times in Austin over those decades. Pat continues to innovate with his own work, and that’s great, but I miss the group – that incredible ensemble playing with a type of sophistication and musicality that was truly innovative and unique. That early clip is good, but the second one is jarring to me because of the orchestra and the lack of Mays and other core members, providing the Group sound.
ReplyDeleteMuch of PMG’s recorded music is accessible as commercial tracks (all those Grammys!!), but if you want to hear them at their finest, I recommend the one-hour jazz work that they ended their run with in 2005 called The Way Up. The CD is excellent, but I much prefer to watch and hear their DVD performance, recorded in South Korea. Someone uploaded it in parts to Youtube here (some 5sec ads):
https://youtu.be/K7nZqFrTxYA
My life would be much less musically rich without PMG.
The keyboard player, in case anyone is interested, is Lyle Mays.
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