By Steve Chase

Someone at work told me about the music service Pandora a year ago, but I hadn’t bothered to check it out until I recently loaded the Pandora App on my iPhone and turned it on during a long drive. There are many music “services” on the Internet, some of them available on individual artists’ websites. Generally, they work by streaming an artist-focused “radio station” feed that you can listen to on your computer or through your phone or handheld music player. What makes Pandora different is its musical variety and relationship with the Musical Genome Project. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project).

Here’s how it works: You sign up for a free account. Then the system asks you to create a radio station based on a favorite artist. I set up a David Grisman Quintet station, and Pandora served up “Why Did the Mouse Marry the Elephant” from the album Dawgnation. Good music. Next, the system gave me a tune from an Edgar Meyer, “Bela Fleck,” and Mike Marshal album called Uncommon Ritual. Good call, and great music.

The Musical Genome Project mapped the Grisman tune using over 400 musical attributes, then the algorithm analyzed and linked it to the next album—and assumed the similarities would appeal to my musical tastes.

Most of the time this works, but not always. The next piece was unexpected, an acoustic guitar piece by artist John Zorn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_zorn) from his album Filmworks XIV: Hiding and Seeking. This one was a little too “smooth jazz” for me, so I quickly clicked the next button. The band Nickel Creek came on with a great up-tempo acoustic ensemble piece called “In the House of Tom Bombadil.”

You get the idea. Here’s the cool thing: you can create a station for just about any group you can think of. I’ve got a few dozen set up now, from the Grisman Channel to Jean Luc Ponty to a channel for the old Canterbury Scene band Hatfield and the North. In all, there’s a lot of music to choose from, and infinite combinations as the system chooses music that it thinks you will like.

There are some drawbacks. In the free mode, you are limited to a certain number of hours each month, and you are forced to sit through video and banner ads. You lose the ads and get unlimited time if you buy a paid subscription to the service. Classical music fans will be disappointed at the minimal and narrow amount of content.

With the amount of music I have on my hard drives, I don’t think I’ll have Pandora playing a lot at my house, but it is a worthwhile musical outlet that I will tap occasionally, especially when I want to discover new music. For info, go to www.pandora.com and try it out.

Machine Made

A Pat Metheny album (www.patmetheny.com) is getting some buzz because of the unique composition of its band—custom-made musical robots instead of actual musicians. On Orchestrion, Metheny controls a variety of mechanical drums, pianos, vibraphones, and even tuned glass bottles from his guitar, creating an interesting ensemble sound. You have to wonder why Metheny would want to interact with musical “robots.” For the creative challenge, maybe, but also for the similarities to the work of Conlon Nancarrow, who created player-piano compositions far too complex and difficult for a human to play. Then there’s the amazing synclavier work of Frank Zappa, a composer that I wouldn’t readily affiliate with Pat Metheny. There are sections of the album that the Musical Genome Project would connect with Zappa’s Civilization Phase III or Jazz From Hell, and I can hear those Zappaesque passages in Metheny’s Orchestrion compositions. Once again, Metheny has redefined his music.

But the question remains: Could you sit through a two-hour concert watching a guy with a guitar play a bunch of machines? I was not sure that I could.

Metheny will perform with his Orchestrion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrion) in May at the Strathmore in Bethesda. There are recordings of his current European tour on the Web now. The Stockholm concert I got my hands on sounds fantastic, well worth the price of a ticket. We were able to get front row seats for the Strathmore show. I’ll let you know how it goes.