Your Thoughts On Pat Metheny?

His collaborations with Brad Mehldau are indeed forgettable.
However, he is one of few artists (maybe with John Zorn and Mike Patton) who can play two extremes : easy listening ('letter from home') and avant-garde music ('Song X', 'Zero tolerance for silence').

By the way, if you like his eighties stuff, Marc  Berthoumieux (accordionist) is mandatory listen.

I haven't checked out anything recent by him except Orchestrion, which I enjoyed a lot, and has the feel of the Group albums, though a little mechanical sounding, if you will. I hear the live Orchestrion album from last year is even better.

However, I mostly enjoy everything I've heard from Pat Metheny. Some of his solo albums are favorites, some of the PMG albums are as well. Also, albums he appears on with other jazz greats are usually awesome, like Parallel Realities: Live with Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, and Dave Holland. That album from 1990 is one of the best jazz/fusion albums in the last 25 years.

I find that album he did with the 'mechanical accompaniment' a.k.a. Orchestrion to be very stiff and laboured albeit it's a very ingenious and imaginative use of technology. Otherwise I find his music to be unremittingly soulless, bland and like so much post 70's fusion, tantamount to a hollow victory for accuracy over expression. He has a lovely head of hair though...