Pat Metheny and his Orchestrion are due to be the subject of a profile on this weekend's CBS Sunday Morning. The tour continues this weekend after a performance in LA Variety described as "more fun visually than pretty much any jazz show one might attend," creating "a remarkably pure and organic musical sound." After last week's show in Austin, the American-Statesman describes it as "a musical happening of the highest order—a jaw-dropping confluence of jazz, technology and visual art."
Pat Metheny and his Orchestrion project are due to be the subject of a profile on this weekend's CBS Sunday Morning. Tune in to your local CBS station on Sunday to watch Metheny play the custom-made set of instruments he controls via solenoid switches and pneumatics featured on his most recent Nonesuch release, Orchestrion, and on his current tour of the same name. For local times and listings, visit cbsnews.com.
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The Orchestrion tour continues out west this weekend with stops at the Grand Sierra Resort Theatre in Reno tonight, Zellerbach Hall in San Francisco on Saturday, and the Napa Valley Opera House on Sunday.
Earlier this week, the tour stopped in Los Angeles, where Metheny performed with his orchestrion at Walt Disney Concert Hall, become the first jazz artist to perform there at three separate occasions, reports Variety magazine.
"Metheny is being himself, playing lengthy guitar lines that never seem to break, shifting only slightly in tempos and rarely deviating from the lyricism for which he is so well-known," says Variety reviewer Phil Gallo. "It's more fun visually than pretty much any jazz show one might attend."
Gallo is sure to put at ease readers who might wonder whether all the technology that makes the orchestrion such a marvel might distance Metheny and the audience. Rather, he says, it creates "a remarkably pure and organic musical sound."
Read the complete concert review at variety.com.
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Last week, the Orchestrion tour stopped at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas. The Austin American-Statesman describes it as "a musical happening of the highest order—a jaw-dropping confluence of jazz, technology and visual art."
Reviewer Brad Buchholz calls it "a one-man band like you've never seen" and found the music of the Orchestrion album itself to be "an expansive, picturesque jazz symphony in five movements, the room filling with sound as his virtual orchestra sprang to life."
Buchholz continues: "Metheny’s music moves. It satisfies, intensely, in a textural, orchestral sense. And it’s infused with the joy of an artist who seems forever young in his passion to try new things, to see new ways, to take new journeys."
Read the concert review at statesman.com.
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The orchestrion is featured in a profile for the McClatchy newspapers, published in both the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and PopMatters. For the piece, writer Jordan Levin looks at Metheny's lifelong interest in the orchestrion in its earlier incarnations and follows the trajectory of this musical and technological explorer as he creates the unique, 21st-century version he plays on the album and on the road.
"His decades-long interest in the instrument served him well," writes Levin, so that today, after all those years, "the basic gesture of playing the guitar becomes a whole orchestra of sounds, an experience he describes as intimate and infinite at the same time."
You'll find the piece at post-gazette.com and popmatters.com.
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For more on upcoming Orchestrion tour dates, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour. To pick up a copy of the album on vinyl or CD, with high-quality album MP3s included at no additional cost, visit the Nonesuch Store.
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