Wednesday night, the way scalpers sidled up to people in front of the Spreckels Theater and asked, sotto voce, out of the corner of their mouths, “You need any tickets?,” one might have assumed that Usher or Lady Gaga or a similar megastar of the pop firmament was performing that evening. But once inside, seated, and the show underway, one would have seen a man, long wavy hair flowing wildly to his shoulders, playing guitar as he stood alone in the middle of a stage full of instruments: a guitar propped upright on a stand, a vibraphone, a marimba, a grand piano, and strange unidentifiable instruments which looked like ribbons mounted upright on parallel metal strips.

Pat Metheny.

^{Courtesy photo}

Who was this guitarist, who brought such black market glee to ticket sellers without and such musical delight to ticket holders within? It was Pat Metheny, and his show rounded out a trifecta of jazz guitarists visiting San Diego in April and March. Anthology hosted John Scofield and Bill Frisell, but Metheny’s show took up so much real estate that it required a larger stage, like the one at Spreckels.

The show opened with Metheny on stage by himself (and the instruments), playing acoustic guitar, an unharmonized melody for a good 2 minutes until he finally added some chords; but, by and large this number was a fast picked melodic solo. The second work used a different acoustic guitar, this time emphasizing the resonant qualities of the instrument, aided by some effects processing which extended the sustained notes past their normal decay.

Then, things quickly got strange as a guitar was brought out to Metheny which looked like something the natives on Rigel V would have played on the original Star Trek series. Over 3 dozen strings criss-crossed over the body, which featured a traditional fretted fingerboard, a short fat fretless neck above and parallel to that, and a third wide neck jutting up at a 45-degree angle to the other fretless neck. Metheny used his left hand to hammer on bass notes on the fretted board, while his right hand plucked the open strings attached to the other two necks. I almost expected Mr. Spock to walk out with his Vulcan harp and jam with Pat. My microtonally-challenged ears could not identify the tuning system used on those open strings, but I’d guess that it was some kind of just intonation, which gave the piece and performance even more of an otherworldly quality.

By this time, someone with no knowledge of Metheny’s last CD (Orchestrion) might have wondered, “Where’s the rest of the band? Who’s going to play all those instruments on stage?” Metheny gave a taste of things to come when he sat down to play his electric guitar; before strumming his first chord, a pair of mounted finger cymbals to his left smacked out a rhythm. Yes, you read that properly—the finger cymbals played themselves, as if an invisible djinn had been summoned to keep time for Metheny. The guitarist ripped away on a twisting bebop solo with the tiny cymbals clashing away alongside him, as if it were a generally accepted fact of life that all musicians have a pair of ghostly-operated finger cymbals to keep time for them.

At the conclusion of this work, a curtain behind the piano was lifted to reveal a three-level tower of drums, cymbals, shakers, a glockenspiel, a bass guitar, and an electric guitar. The theatricality and surprise of this gesture was so strong that the audience gasped in wonder.

This was the meat of the program: Metheny performing with and also controlling an entire stage full of mechanically-played instruments. If you’ve heard his latest CD, Orchestrion, you know that he achieves a remarkably warm, human sound with this ensemble. As far as the actual compositions go, they are pretty much the same large-scale pieces which Metheny has written and performed for the past 3 decades: works with well-shaped build-ups to wonderfully timed climaxes, lush, scale-based harmonies, and memorable melodies, all of which showcase his effortless technique and his convincing improvisations.

However, Orchestrion stands out from his other work in its textural density (sometimes 6 or 7 different ideas are interweaving) and its unusual ensemble of multiple mallet instruments and an organ consisting of large bottles which produce a low flute-like tone when blown. Could Metheny have simply plunked these instruments out on stage and manned them with live musicians? Of course he could have; but if you have to ask why he would go to all the trouble to have those Rube Goldberg contraptions built, you don’t get it.

Why do grown men build medieval catapults? Why do people lay out thousands of dominos in lines just to watch them fall in creative ways? Why do engineers build the equivalent of a jet exhaust to light their barbecue grills? Why does a guy amass the largest collection of mechanical instruments ever assembled, and then play a guitar solo on top of them? Because it’s cool, and therefore, it’s worth doing. To hell with practicality; if it’s something sweet to watch, it’s worth the challenge of creating and executing.

Now how’s this for neat: for every note played by one of the unpitched percussion instruments, a light flashed on for the duration of the note, and off again when it’s finished. Every time one of the bottles on the calliope was sounded, the whole bottle lit up. Every note by the bass guitar was highlighted by a globe which changed color according to the pitch played on the bass. Epic!

Metheny can play each and every instrument in real time using his guitar controller. In the work preceding Orchestrion, he used the controller to first play the bass guitar; that bass line repeated, and as it did, Metheny added another line on the marimba; that in turn repeated, and he added a third part on the vibraphone, and then brought in yet another line on the bottle organ. It was a simple riff piece, built up one layer at a time, and once Metheny had an interesting enough texture going, he soloed on top of it. He later created another layered riff piece, but midway through his guitar solo, he tapped a foot pedal and the whole ensemble modulated to another key for a few loops, and then returned to the original key.

If there’s a drawback to Metheny’s orchestrion (his term for his collection of mechnical instruments), it is in the limited nature of basing an improvisation entirely on layering one new riff on top of the preceding loop. Also, if you’re going to have a humongous mechanical orchestra at your disposal, why not write some music for it which would be impossible for human musicians to perform? In an improvisation on what sounded like an Ornette Coleman chart, the texture became so dense, so oversaturated, that the novelty of it made it one of the most interesting movements of the evening, even if the improvisation itself was not so spectacular.

It also would have been nice to give some propers to the mad scientists at LEMUR who made this whole project possible.

I am not likely to forget the sight and sound of Metheny and his orchestrion, and I doubt my fellow audience members will either. If you have the opportunity to catch this tour, scrape up the money and buy yourself a ticket. You will not regret the experience.

For information on Pat Metheny and his orchestrion, click here.

For photos of early 20th-century mechanical instruments, go here.

To hear the entire Orchestrion CD for free, hear here.