It’s Pat Metheny‘s Orchestrion….
Here are a couple videos of Pat explaining where the concept came from.
Here’s a brief synopsis:
The genesis of this project comes from my grandfather’s basement. My mom’s dad was a great musician; he had all kinds of instruments. He was a fantastic professional trumpet player, he was a banjo player, a great singer, and among the instruments in his collection was a player piano from the late 1800s and the early 1900s that were so popular when he was a kid. And he introduced me to that, and had lots of piano rolls, and I just thought it was the coolest thing. I, of course, loved to go to Wisconsin where they lived — my Mom’s home town was Manitowoc, Wisconsin — every summer, anyway. But one of the highlights was getting to play with the player piano, and I used to get under there and get a flashlight and try to figure out how it worked, and I would unscrew things and screw them in. It was just fantastic for me to really get inside there and sort of imagine the mechanics of it.
It’s interesting he mentions Manitowoc, WI — only four hours from The House on the Rock, which boasts entire rooms of audio animatronic instruments playing classical music.
And, it’s basically a real version of Animusic, which I recorded off PBS forever and used to put on for my kids all the time:
The new Metheny album is coming out Jan 26 on Nonesuch, followed by nationwide tour beginning in April. Saint Paul tour date is May 9 at the Fitzgerald Theater.
