Charlie and Pat

I am trying to pick something out on guitar. It will take a while, but I could potentially learn it. And I’ll explain as I go.

Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny have teamed occasionally to put together some incredible music. It is no secret to any of you who follow this blog that I am a long-time fan of the music of Pat Metheny, and his work with Charlie Haden on their collaboration in “Beyond The Missouri Sky (Short Stories).” The CD was released in 1997, I believe, and it is the first time these two musicians recorded together. For those of you not familiar with Charlie Haden, he is a bassist – he’s done a lot of work in both jazz and in his roots as a country-western musician. The former was mostly when he was a young man in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. And I think some of this shows in his jazz work.

Another incredible musician that I’ve learned about over the past 15-20 years is the composer Jimmy Webb. He’s been around for quite some time as well – I want to say he is in his early 60’s – and he has an impressive body of work that has been performed by so many musicians. If you look around, I can almost guarantee you that an artist that you listen to a lot of has done at least one Jimmy Webb song during their career. A couple of examples: “Up, Up, and Away” – that song about the balloon that was popular in the late ‘60’s. Another is the Glen Campbell classic “Wichita Lineman” – that was also covered by James Taylor recently, and I wrote about this song last year.

I stumbled on this recording a couple of weeks ago. I own it, and I’d basically not paid attention to it, but I heard it on Satellite or Pandora. So I took a closer listen and discovered an incredibly beautiful rendition of a different Webb classic. I wanted to share it.

With luck, I’ll figure out the guitar picking at some point. But it will take a while, considering how rudimentary my guitar skills are…