By Scott Pohl, WKAR News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkar/local-wkar-927997.mp3
EAST LANSING, MI –
Pat Metheny is one of the world's most renowned jazz guitarists.
On Sunday night, he'll bring an ambitious project to the Wharton Center at Michigan State University.
He calls it an "orchestrion". It's a complicated musical device he controls from his guitar. Among the things it includes are pianos, marimbas, bells, and blown bottles.
Metheny talked with WKAR's Scott Pohl.
AUDIO:
<SCOTT POHL: "I need to ask you at the top here, what is an orchestrion? It sounds like a glorified one-man band."
PAT METHENY: "Well, this is a pretty unusual project by sort of any measure.
"The origins of this whole thing kind of go back to my grandfather's basement. He was a really good musician. This is my mom's dad. He kind of collected instruments, and amongst his collection was a really nice player piano, and I was fascinated with that thing, especially the summer I was nine. I spent the whole summer under there, trying to figure out what was going on, and over the years (I) went off and did all of the other stuff I've done as a musician, but I've always continued to be interested in that sort of odd period in musical instrument history, where there were these mechanical instruments, and it really kind of dissipated around the time that sound recording evolved.
"When you could put up a microphone and actually record somebody playing or singing, the whole idea of having piano rolls and player pianos kind of went away. But it was such a weird, cool idea, and I always wondered why hadn't somebody looked at that through the prism of a particular musical point of view?', and also sort of addressing it from the, let's say, 21st century point of view, meaning that we now have so much control of things, in terms of what we can do with computers, software, and so forth. What if that were applied to an actual acoustic result?
"In other words, what I'm doing doesn't involve synthesizers. It involves dozens, hundreds of moving parts, banging, smacking, plucking, hitting real musical instruments as I'm playing the guitar, and the reason I'm calling it the Orchestrion Project is that after player pianos, sort of as a last gasp to try to keep it going, they started attaching other instruments to the player piano mechanism, like a snare drum or a cymbal or mallet instrument or whatever, and it didn't really catch on, but that idea is sort of the same idea that I'm working off of, which is to have a whole range of instruments available that I can address either as an improviser or as a composer, but basically this ensemble of instruments, of which I'm sort of conductor of, I guess you'd say, or the composer of."
SP: "I wanted to ask you how much of this is mechanical, and how much of it is electronics and computers, or a combination of the two?"
PM: "Well, the whole control side of it, the whole front end part of it, is about as 21st century as you could get. I'm doing all kinds of stuff using three or four different platforms in very unusual ways, from the control side, meaning getting it to, getting the organization of it all together. The output side is 100% mechanical, 19th century. I just kind of skipped over the 20th century! It's like 21st century talking to 19th century, that's sort of what's happening."
SP: "How much of this end result device then, if that's the right term to use, is you, and how much did you need the help of others, to build and construct the orchestrion setup?"
PM: "Well, I didn't build anything. I'm not a builder. What I did do was, over all these years, because I maintained an interest in this general part of the musical instrument community I guess you'd call it, I knew that this guy was very good at working with solenoids, and that this guy was very good at working with pneumatic devices, and this guy over here had done some cool stuff based on pipe organ technology, and this guy over here was doing some cool stuff manipulating plucked things. So, I sort of had my list of people who I knew were very good as builders, and then I started commissioning them, saying I'm going to put together this thing, and I want your version of this, this, this, this, and this, and I'd like you to do this and do this.'
"And, also key to this whole thing is the Yamaha Disklavier, which is in many ways still the most sophisticated instrument of this type. Everybody's seen them in action somewhere or other. That's the piano that sort of plays itself, and that technology is basically the same kind of technology that's applied to all of the other instruments that I have, in different ways."
SP: "While you're on tour, is this easy to set up, difficult to set up? Do you have a big crew? Is it something you can do yourself when you move from place to place?"
PM: "It requires a crew of a few people. It's not, also, I mean, I am a jazz guy. We're not talking Pink Floyd level here. I've got to do it in a sort of reasonable way. It takes a fairly good sized vehicle to move everything around. It takes six or seven hours to set it all up. It takes two or three hours to tear it all down, which I could say is pretty much exactly the same if I do a trio gig or a gig with my regular group, too. It's really pretty much exactly like everything else I've done in terms of that stuff."
WHAT ABOUT THE MUSIC?
SP: "Alright, well, we've talked about the mechanics of making all this work, but I want to ask you about the music you're making with it. Has it inspired you to venture into areas of music that you weren't able to before, because of technical limitations, or anything of that sort? How has it inspired you musically?"
PM: "It's hard for me to compare it to anything else, because, I mean, I would say the headline about this (is) it's not better than anything else; it's not worse than anything else. It's different. It's a different palette. It's a different way to work. It's a different result. It's a different sense of what music can be, and that's been incredibly inspiring.
"It's been a chance for me to discover a whole lot of possible results that I just would not gotten to in any other way, and that's true of all the music that's on the record. I just wouldn't have written that music. I wouldn't have ever thought of it, and at the same time, people hear the record and they go wow, that sounds exactly what I'm supposed to sound like,' you know? I mean, it's not like it's some, I think some people are even a little bit disappointed, like wow, you know, it sounds so good! It should sound terrible!' or it should sound robotic, or it should sound this, that, or the other thing, and to me, if it did sound like that, I wouldn't have done it, because to me, the idea of an instrument is that it should allow you to express in detail how you hear things and how you feel, and I was really able to do that under these auspices.
"And, it's sort of a different material to work with, but I can still tell stories with it, and the fact that it's me, it's going to come through the filter of my thing, and you know, it's been incredibly invigorating for me to kind of bump up against these possibilities."
OLD FANS, NEW FANS?
SP: "You've touched on this a little bit, but I wanted to find out the extent to which you think your base audience has embraced this, and along with that, I'm curious if the technology may have attracted some people who weren't particularly familiar with you before, geeks if you will, to check out the recording or come to the concerts. Have you seen some of that?"
PM: "It's been a wildly successful year for me. I mean, I've done more than 100 concerts around the world at this point, and just about all of them have been sold out, and I've never gotten an audience reaction like this. One thing that is true, and this is true for even people that are listening now, even if you don't know who I am, and you've never heard a note of jazz in your life, you should come to the concert, because it is like something you've never seen before. And I think, just that for people has been interesting. And, yet, at the same time, let's say the novelty factor of it, which is significant, is really not what it's about in the end. I mean, very quickly, people tell me it's like they sort of forget about it, and it's just all about the music, and that's as it should be. But, at the same time, you know, there's an element of it that's just fun, and it's, when you see it live, I mean, it's this big thing that's moving and smacking stuff around. It's not like you're not going to notice what's going on, I mean, it's something unusual, and that's part of what's making it interesting to audiences, but I think ultimately, it's the music that's doing the thing.
"In terms of how it's been received, also, I just got news a little while ago, it just got Record of the Year in Downbeat (magazine), so I mean, you know, that's among the really, the jazz guys who maybe I would have thought might have been a little bit skeptical about it or something, and so it does seem like people are, you know, kind of understanding the uniqueness of it and also, what I'm kind of going for musically."
SP: "Pat Metheny, thank you very much. Good talking with you."
PM: "My pleasure."