I’ve just gotten around to listening to Orchestrion, the latest album by the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, and I’m extremely impressed. It’s one of the best new jazz albums I’ve heard in quite some time, and it’s a highlight of Metheny’s distinguished career of more than three decades. The album is an ambitious endeavor in the process used for composing and arranging the songs: Metheny employs an orchestrion, an update of a nineteenth-century gizmo that enabled a keyboard or piano roll to control several musical instruments and even a wind orchestra, simultaneously. Metheny uses one controlled by his guitar, and the results are stunning. These are brilliant, complex songs that don’t sound gimmicky at all, thanks to Metheny’s skill as both a guitarist and a composer. The result is a compositional style that combines elements of jazz and classical chamber music in a truly exciting and replicable way. The title song is largely allegro and dominated by quick arpeggios on piano and other keyboards and tuned percussion. It features a very distinctive melody theme which is introduced by guitar and piano, leading then to a long passage featuring a rhythmic foundation of intricate, staccato arpeggios led by piano and tuned

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