I Never Meta Guitar Three, Solo Guitars for the 21st Century, Produced by Elliott Sharp

The avant guitar solo scene these days is eclectic and all-encompassing, as electric and soulful as Hendrix, as painstaking new-sound oriented as Derek Bailey, as focused and single-minded as Elliott Sharp. All this we can experience in I Never Meta Guitar Three (Clean Feed CFG 007), the Elliott Sharp produced-curated anthology of solo guitar in its third volume. The third takes up where volumes one and two leave off, with a new crew of guitarists; some who follow such things will perhaps recognize many names, others perhaps will be unfamiliar to many.

We get highly electric or acoustically particular solos from the likes of John King, Indigo Street, Joel Peterson, Kirsten Carey, Cristian Amigo, Adam Brisbin, Sandy Ewen, Anders Nilsson, Peter Maunu, Bruce Eisenbeil, Simone Massaron, Lily Maase, David Fulton, Jim McCauley, Angela Babin, Brandon Seabrook, Alessandra Novago and Ed Ricart.

There are too many examples to cover individually here. Suffice to say that they all share a dedication to extending the sound color range and technical possibilities of the guitar today, from myriads of electrical transformations from effects and wattage to micro-tonalities and colors obtained via extended ways of sounding the strings.

It is another fascinating jaunt into the possibilities out there today. Anyone concerned with the guitar as a medium of new music sounds should explore this anthology. Even the merely curious will be rewarded with much to contemplate and appreciate on repeated listenings. This is what's happening NOW!

THEO, The Game of Ouroboros

If new prog floats your boat--especially something that does not look back so much as plows a new field out of post-new-wave--you should listen to THEO and their The Game of Ouroboros (BIGO2422/GENPRCD007). It is a band with good songs, pristine musicianship, and a very contemporary feel, especially in dealing with the automated realworld 1984 zone we live in.

The guitarist and keyboardist are very much a factor here, but the entire band comes at you in arranged flourishes that are not tacked-on to songs as much as they organically grow out of them. The vocals are strong, the music equally so. It is a band with rock torque that remains alive, contemporary yet still hard hitting.

The lyrics stand up to scrutiny in what they say about living in this world right now, yet the music carries you forward at the same time.

It is an album of real importance, I think. These guys do not have a single cliche in their bodies, so what we get is something truly new and quite innovative. The prog zone is not dead! THEO gives it new life.

Hear it repeatedly and you'll be there, too.

Benjamin Duboc, Alexandra Grimal, le retour d'Ulysse

Synchrony works in unpredictable ways. No sooner have I appreciated soprano-tenor voice Alexandra Grimal on a duet album for Ayler Records (see Gapplegate Music Review article published this month) than she is back again very prominently and nicely, in duet with avant bass-master Benjamin Duboc, on a two-cd set le retour d'Ulysse (Improvising Beings ib32).

This outing has the free jazz element out front, with plenty of space for both players in tandem and in themselves. I've been digging Benjamin Duboc for a while now--and you may note I named his solo album the bass offering of the year last December (see December 2014 listings). Alexandra I am really getting into as well now. The pairing of the two is good for them both and good for us, the listeners.

They give us a full-blown free program with the accent on spontaneous combustion. Both are hearing and playing with close focus and the results are rather magical. It's primo, no bs jazz declamation.

And for that it is exemplary for what a reedwoman and a bassist can do when let loose. Alexandra has arrived. Benjamin sets a place beside himself and they dig in with gusto!

Highly recommended.

Barry Guy, Five Fizzles for Samuel Beckett, EP LP

Anyone who knows the scene knows that Barry Guy is one of the very foremost bass artists on the contemporary avant improv jazz horizon. He has been for years. No one can touch his sound footprint, whether bowing, pizzicato or utilizing a mix of sound production techniques.

A solo EP LP is available by Barry, called Five Fizzles for Samuel Beckett (No Business EP 02). It was recorded in an ambient cathedral in 2009. The five improvised movements show an extroverted Barry pulling out all his resourceful creative sound-producing abilities. Harmonics, a sort of rattling ambience, smears of multi-articulated sonics, playing below the bridge, you-name-it, he goes there in effective artistic ways. Even just Barry doing pizz gives you his signature, but he is everywhere on this one.

He pulls it all together in a 15-20 minute tribute to the great 20th-century writer.

If you have even the slightest interest in the avant contrabass you will find this one rewarding and satisfying. It is indispensable listening. Highly recommended.

Junior Wells, Southside Blues Jam, with Buddy Guy, Otis Spann, Louis Myers

When one of the very greatest Chicago blues recordings arrives at your door, and you already know that because you had the LP, it is cause for joy.

I refer to Junior Wells and his album Southside Blues Jam (Delmark 628). Junior was an artist who had major label exposure by the time he waxed these sides in Delmark's studio in 1969-70. The big labels expected some blues "product" and chart success. Delmark was glad to record him again, because they dug him. They liked it when has was doing the blues the way he'd do it at the Southside clubs, raw, soulful, every song a story that is meant to communicate right to YOU. There is Junior on vocals and harp, the two-guitar punch of Buddy Guy and Louis Myers, the piano of Otis Spann, Earnest Johnson on bass and Fred Below on drums.

The CD has alternate takes and extra cuts, and they all add to the cumulative impact of this direct assault on your blues soul. Junior is inspired and very loose, Buddy and Otis and the rest are totally there commenting and participating musically and otherwise, and damn if this isn't music that still sounds just as great, just as true, just as real and just as blue as it ever did.

The blues will never die when there's trouble in your life. I listen now after losing one of my best friends a week ago. He loved this album and his troubles did not last always, because, hey, sometimes you just die. That's the truth of the blues, that it might get better but in the end there is an end to it. Sometimes you are gonna be "walkin' from the bottom of the floor," as Junior sings it. Sometimes you aren't wanted in the very neighborhood you call home. And what do you do? You give out with every drop of feeling in concentrated blues form. And you tell that "old man" Mayor Daily he needs to KNOW about the blues. Yeah. He did.

That is what this is. It is so honest and true that it hits you like a Mack truck. Otis and Buddy pour it on and Junior gets truly worked up into a frenzied passion. You don't imitate this because this is IT. This is the thing that cannot be made into product. Because it's so damned real.

Just get it.

Paul Elwood, Nice Folks

What a world we live in today, musically. Literally anything can be combined and is. And sometimes that combination is so successful as to take you very much by surprise, even by shock. Take Paul Elwood's Nice Folks (Innova 903). It is the sort of thing you first put on and the eyebrows start going up. After a while you are mumbling, WTF?! Or at least that was my reaction.

Paul Elwood wrote and arranged most of the music. He plays the five-string banjo and does it well. Neither like Bela Fleck on one end of things or Brandon Seabrook on the avant side, Paul goes his own way, having absorbed old-style playing as well as Scruggs claw-hammer picking style. He can take it way out or go string band traditional and all in the context of a large ensemble and vocal group. The Art Ensemble's Famoudou Don Moye is the drummer here and he is perfect. He KNOWs how to go everywhere at once and so is ready for the everything that comes, and he does his usual wonderful job putting something very Famoudou into the mix.

Paul and Kelsey Shiba are the principal vocalists. The band is eight people, Paul and Don, electric guitar, trombone, reeds and so forth. The band goes everywhere from string band to rock to avant jazz to old timey jazz, sometimes all at once.

And it works! It really does. There is a humor and seriousness that makes everything pop. And even if you weren't ready for this, you give it a chance and, wow, this is a real-deal hybrid that is bizarre but seriously good!

I am in awe. But you'd have to listen a few times with open ears and you'd get what I am getting. I can't give you more words because the telling is in the sound! Whew!

The Grip Weeds, How I Won the War

There are bands out there today, some very good, that somehow channel early psychedelia-song form and make it new. The Grip Weeds are one. Their album How I Won the War (Jem MVD7134A) shows you how.

They have that two-guitars, bass and drums heated proficiency, good tunes and vocals that are there. They do a good job with George's "The Inner Light," which is not easy to do w/o the Indian instruments. And their own songs have something to them that makes you glad they are around.

I won't say they sound like anybody in particular--they sound like everybody back then only they don't. And they are very well rehearsed. The Smithereens might come to mind as far as good things done well go.

If you like that kind of thing--like I do--then this one will give you definite kicks!