19th-Century Concept, with a Few Upgrades
Pat Metheny, the jazz guitarist, has lately spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about robots. Actually, that's putting it mildly: he has been downright obsessed with robots, and with getting them to do his bidding. “I haven't slept more than four hours a night for six months now," he said one day last fall at a makeshift rehearsal space in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, the former home of a Byzantine Catholic church.
Wearing a T-shirt and faded jeans, his tousled mane tucked under a baseball cap, Mr. Metheny stood before a 14-foot-high, 35-foot-wide wall festooned with musical instruments: an imposing, circuit-wired one-man band. The contraption itself seemed byzantine, all the more so when it sprang to life in a mechanical whirl: beaters tapping cymbals, levers gliding over strings, mallets cascading across a vibraphone.
Mr. Metheny closed his eyes and hunched over his guitar, bringing a human touch to “Expansion," the centerpiece of his new album, Orchestrion (Nonesuch). With its shifting tonal center and fluttering groove, the tune combined aspects of post-Coltrane jazz and Brazilian pop with cinematic breadth. So beyond the obvious technical feat--thousands of moving parts, executing a programmed score--the performance dazzled on a basic level. Mr. Metheny and the unmanned orchestra were making his kind of music.
Wearing a T-shirt and faded jeans, his tousled mane tucked under a baseball cap, Mr. Metheny stood before a 14-foot-high, 35-foot-wide wall festooned with musical instruments: an imposing, circuit-wired one-man band. The contraption itself seemed byzantine, all the more so when it sprang to life in a mechanical whirl: beaters tapping cymbals, levers gliding over strings, mallets cascading across a vibraphone.
Mr. Metheny closed his eyes and hunched over his guitar, bringing a human touch to “Expansion," the centerpiece of his new album, Orchestrion (Nonesuch). With its shifting tonal center and fluttering groove, the tune combined aspects of post-Coltrane jazz and Brazilian pop with cinematic breadth. So beyond the obvious technical feat--thousands of moving parts, executing a programmed score--the performance dazzled on a basic level. Mr. Metheny and the unmanned orchestra were making his kind of music.
