Metheny to play solo, sort of, at Ruth Eckerd on Friday

Pat Metheny's performance Friday night at Ruth Eckerd Hall will be solo, after a fashion.

He'll be the only human musician on stage, but there will be an array of instruments playing along with Metheny's guitar.

The set-up, like Metheny's most recent album, is called "Orchestrion." The term originally referred to a multi-instrument construction that was controlled by paper rolls, like a player
piano.

Metheny's version, the result of years-long collaboration with inventors and technicians, combines the 19th century idea with 21st century technology, giving him not only an array of sounds but also flexibility in how to use them.

"It can be whatever I want it to be, very flexible and open ended," Metheny writes in an e-mail.

"It is kind of a 360 degree experience for me in that I am responsible for every aspect of every note ... whether improvised or written," Metheny writes. "That is often largely true by degrees in other situations as well where I am the leader, but because I am functioning as a kind of multi-instrumentalist in this environment, it challenges me on many other levels.

"There are many, many ways I can set up conversations, question and answers, calls and responses and everything from the most composed and organized sound to the most totally improvised sounds, using many combinations of instruments or any solo instruments ... ," Metheny writes.

The material from "Orchestrion," released in January, is the "centerpiece" of the show, Metheny writes, but "I have a wide range of things that I can do including some older things. It is a lot of fun to organize the older stuff to be played by these instruments, but it is fairly time consuming to do. Someday I would love to do a project where I do just that for a whole evening."

A video posted on Metheny's site shows some of what the Orchestrion is capable of. Watch it here: http://www.patmetheny.com/orchestrioninfo/

ON TOUR

Pat Metheny

WHEN: 8 p.m., Friday

WHERE: Ruth Eckerd Hall, 1111 McMullen-Booth Road, Clearwater; (727) 791-7400

HOW MUCH: $41, $51 and $71