Pat Metheny

Pat Metheny's new ­Orchestrion project, in which he's the sole flesh-and-blood soloist amid a clamorous band of robot instruments, sounds on record so much like a mingling of the guitar star's classic albums of the past 20 years as to ­suggest he did this monumentally eccentric thing simply because he could. Live, it's a different matter. Metheny ran a two-and-a-half-hour show in front of a clacking, beating and ­chiming ­curiosity shop of drums, cymbals, marimbas, keyboards and self-strumming guitars under his ­spontaneous direction, and it will go down as one of the most remarkable one-man shows in music history. When the Heath ­Robinsonian behemoth broke down right on the finale, listeners were ­nothing but sympathetic. "Switch it off and on again," someone advised. First, Metheny played two sublime solo acoustic pieces from his recent partnership with Brad Mehldau. On jazz guitar, he then played Unity Village from his classic Bright Size Life, and robot finger cymbals began to chirrup away. A bluesy piano riff rocked below flat-out ­strumming, Soul Search revealed that Metheny the composer retained his ­lilting country-ballad knack, and he playfully made the massed percussion chase his melody line on a freebop-ish Ornette Coleman twister. The vocal-toned ­synclavier unleashed a swooping melody over the full-pelt ­machinery, and then the Orchestrion packed up. After a few tries, Metheny just sat on a stool with a guitar and played his best-loved themes. The ­whooping crowd was probably as moved by this indefatigable entertainer's zeal as by the music, but Metheny had played out of his skin to compensate for the ­Orchestrion's tendencies to stiffness, and he deserved every cheer.