By Kevin Coughlin
There was a dramatic moment early in Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion show Saturday when the curtain rose behind him to reveal a wall of shiny instruments.
Soon, lights were blinking all over the stage of Morristown’s Community Theatre as a robotic drum kit, guitar, bass, accordion, bottle organ and more played along with Pat.
I kept expecting the great jazz guitarist to toss back his wild mane and shout up at the fly space: “It’s alive! It’s ALIVE!”
At times, Pat’s Orchestrion — named for mechanical orchestras popular about a century ago–seemed to take on a life of its own. It almost seemed like a real band.
Almost.
Automated backing tracks are not new. Les Paul invented his Les Paulverizer to layer multiple guitar licks during the Eisenhower administration. Neil Young and Todd Rundgren ruffled feathers of rock and roll purists by performing to computerized backing tracks in the 1980s. Broadway buffs still debate the merits of canned soundtracks.
What’s novel about Pat’s Orchestrion –aside from its complexity–is that he conceived it as a musical partner. The robots are not meant merely to back him…they are intended to prod and push him as an artist.
On his website, he explains:
I often say that whether it is developed and performed acoustically or otherwise, with a ten-dollar instrument or sophisticated computer system, good notes are good notes-and are almost always elusive in whatever path one might take to find them. Yet good notes, once revealed, seem to carry their own intrinsic value with them forward, however they came to be. While in pursuit, many times along the way the experience of a new challenge or the search for a new way of looking at things-or a new tool-has allowed me (encouraged me? forced me?) to uncover and ask hard questions of myself as a musician.
As the instruments started to trickle in from the various inventors, the experience of writing for them and figuring out what might be possible with them provided a self-imposed challenge that proved to be difficult and time-consuming, but absolutely exhilarating. I am excited to share this project. If nothing else, this has turned out to be something unique. And in the process of developing all this music and these instruments and discovering what they can do and what they are good at, I learned so much. It feels like progress and has gotten some notes out of me that I didn’t know were there. But the surprise was just how far I was able to go with it all. Within this new environment, I found something in there that took me to some new places.
Pat, 56, did not do a great job explaining to the audience how the Orchestrion works. He mentioned something about solenoids (aren’t they near your tonsils?) driving the assorted instruments with varying intensity, approximating the dynamic range of human players.
And he demonstrated how he could program each instrument through his guitar. Was he conducting the Orchestrion like a maestro? When all the instruments were firing at once, they seemed to be following pre-recorded instructions–similar to the player piano rolls that guided orchestrions of yore.
(Not coincidentally, this project was inspired by Pat’s boyhood discovery of a player piano owned by his grandfather.)
Afterward, a friend commented that he could not envision kicking back and unwinding with the Orchestrion CD.
Indeed, the show was more fun to watch than to listen to; there was something hypnotic about observing a mad genius at work. Sort of like spending two hours and 20 minutes in Frankenstein’s castle as the lightning arcs overhead. The gee-whiz factor was undeniable.
Yet the songs that stuck in my head were the ones Pat played before the curtain went up on the Orchestrion. Especially his sublime The Sound of Water, played on a 42-string Pikasso guitar.
At the end of the evening , Pat jokingly gestured for the Orchestrion to take a bow. The solenoids could not deliver that command.
By then, I missed seeing faces of jubilant musicians exulting in a well earned standing ovation.
Pat Metheny should be applauded for testing the boundaries of music and technology. He should be encouraged to keep exploring. And he deserves thanks for a unique spectacle.
Sometimes it takes a wall of robots to remind us what it means to be human.
