Metheny places this excellent recording in a lineage preceded by One Quiet Night and What’s It All About – two solo guitar recordings – but this is something more. Using a custom-made Linda Manzer Baritone Nylon String Guitar, Metheny has come up with an unusual slant in how he tunes the instrument whereby the middle strings are tuned up an octave to the general tuning of the Baritone instrument (which is about a 4th or a 5th lower that the standard guitar). While that snippet of information may not mean a lot to the non-guitar playing fraternity, it opened up a whole new dimension of harmony that had been unavailable with the standard tuning, inspiring Metheny during the course of a 50-date plus tour to push himself deeper into the exploration of the modified sound palette now available to him.

It also provides the powerful motivating force behind this recording, where he comes up with a repertoire of 14 originals and standards he feels captured what he calls the “magic of this new sound”. Some of the finest albums in jazz somehow find a place in the listener’s life, often fulfilling a function – relaxation to stimulation, background or foreground music and so on. For Metheny, this album is a dusk-to-sunrise record, hard-core mellow – music to fill night, or as Metheny says, offering something to the insomniacs and all-night folks.

Metheny, a compelling soloist, be it electric or acoustic, hits the right mood here with performances of subtlety, nuance, warmth and humanity on The Beatles’ ‘Here There And Everywhere,’ the Matt Dennis masterpiece ‘Angel Eyes,’ and the David Raskin (he who wrote ‘Laura’) standard ‘My Love and I’.