Pat Metheny: Orchestrion

f The intuitive jazz improviser, the ­pop-song tunesmith and the hardware geek have always lived side by side in Pat Metheny. His most commercially successful ventures have peppered Latin, rock and country music ­lyricism with adventurous soloing, across soundscapes coloured by digital ­delays, Synclavier synthesisers, 42-string Pikasso guitars and much more. The Orchestrion project (which comes to London for one gig on 10 February) is Metheny's most ambitious ­experiment. He frames his solos within an ­ensemble of acoustic instruments triggered by solenoids and pneumatics he alone plays simultan­eously. The result sounds ­uncannily like several classic Pat ­Metheny Group albums rolled into one. A Philip Glass-style piano repeat runs ­under a classic ­Metheny long-line melody full of slurred, whooping sounds and shadowed by a vibraphone countermelody, or a mid-tempo groover will curl ­between percussive chord-punctuations. A voice-like guitar line over an 80s-Miles rhythm section momentarily gives way to a bongo break, while a jazzy bass-walk ­underpins Metheny the jazz soloist at his most cool and ­lyrically swinging. It's very melodic (though not very melodically surprising), and technically mind-boggling. But harnessing all this awesome machine power to make just another Pat Metheny Group album without the group seems a bit of a missed ­opportunity.