Julia and I attended Pat Metheny's "Orchestrion" tour performance in Santa Cruz last night, and it was a hugely moving and significant experience for both of us.  The performance itself was emotional, well-paced, interesting and deeply, deeply musical.  Such an assessment would never really be surprising for a Metheny performance except that, on this tour, he's performing with an orchestra of robots.  The concept of what he's doing has been explained throughly elsewhere, so I won't go on about it here, but suffice to say that the performance was engaging from the first moments (during which he played a few beautiful solo guitar pieces) to the last (incorporating the highly technically complicated Orchestrion, which he could trigger live to sync with MIDI instructions from his guitar or cue preset passages and "scenes" using an array of pedals). 

It's hard to say that the highlight of the evening wasn't the music, but the opportunity for Julia and me to speak backstage with Pat after the concert (for about 30 minutes!) was a life experience neither my wife nor I will ever forget.  Here's the obligatory shot with the jazz superstar...

There will be much to say about this encounter later, I think, but we'll leave it this much for now.  Pat is a great guy, and he's generously complimentary of the two of us, which is one of those "I could die now" things, honestly.  His music has been such a huge influence over my writing and singing for the last 20 years, it's just hard to imagine where I'd be or what I'd be doing without that influence.  Julia, I know, would say as much for herself, too.