California Guitar Trio pushes the boundaries of their instrument
Ever since the California Guitar Trio formed in 1991, their albums have been mostly devoted to very entertaining, amusing and sometimes surprising covers of songs from the rock, country, world-music and surf-guitar songbooks — and to their impressive interpretations of classical pieces.
California Guitar Trio bring their eclectic mix to The Ark on Thursday.
Joe Del Tufo
But on their upcoming CD, slated for June release, the Trio will focus more on the members’ own compositions.
“It’s more rocking, and we use a lot of effects, even though we’re still strictly playing acoustic guitars,” says Bert Lams, the Belgian-born, classically trained member of the trio.
“There’s some pretty wild stuff on it, and we’re really excited about it. I’d say this is more of a ‘project-oriented’ album, as opposed to some of our past albums, which had that mix of rock and classical and surf covers,” says Lams, who joins his Trio mates at The Ark for a show on Thursday, April 1.
The California Guitar Trio — which also includes Paul Richards (an American) and Hideyo Moriya (from Japan) — isn’t your average guitar ensemble. These guys are amazingly proficient, as one might gather from the classical-music element. But they’re also dazzling progressive-rock players, despite the fact that they play acoustic guitars — as opposed to plugging into electrified rigs. The prog pedigree comes from their collective guitaristic “upbringing” in the ‘80s, when they met in the Guitar Craft Courses conducted by prog-guitar poobah Robert Fripp.
After completing several of those intensive courses, they were invited to join Fripp’s League of Crafty Guitarists, which embarked on a few big tours in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Fripp then dismantled that ensemble, but suggested to Richards, Lams and Moriya that they form their own group.
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“By then, we'd become friends, and had a common interest in an eclectic approach of music” — as opposed to the more minimalistic approach favored by Fripp in the League, says Lams during a phone interview from a tour stop in Oregon.
“And then we thought it would be fun to bring a sense of humor to it — in terms of the songs selection, the way we played the tunes, and the pacing of an album or show. I remember, early on, I was working really hard on an arrangement of a Bach fugue, which is pretty serious music, and out of nowhere, Hideyo threw in a surf-guitar section, because he’s really into that music and had grown up on it.
“I laughed, and it struck me as fun, and we began throwing that in during the live shows, and then it just evolved to be this more natural thing.”
Their sometimes tongue-in-cheek approach to choosing and playing songs is in full evidence on their latest disc, “Echoes.” The title track is indeed the Pink Floyd song of that name, and the disc also includes sometimes droll but also musically-ambitious covers of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird,” Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells.”
Listen to a selection of songs by California Guitar Trio:
But on “Freebird,” they don’t just start with the blistering, three-guitar freak-out section that comprises that song’s second half. They start at the beginning, unspooling the slow, mournful melody of the original’s first section, and they carry it right on through to the end.
Lams says that their decision to perform that song live, and record it, was actually born out of one of the most shopworn, annoyingly unfunny clichés employed by nitwit and / or drunken fans at shows who — believe it or not — still think it’s hilarious, more than 35 years after the fact, to bellow “Freebird!” as a mock request.
“Yeah, we couldn’t believe, at almost every gig, someone would still yell that, and we looked at each other, and one of us said, ‘If one more person yells that, we’re actually going to play it.’ It started out as just a few bars, then we decided to add the solos and everything.” So, even though the Trio members flaunt their considerable chops when they play it, the fact that they’re playing it is still a joke of sorts — a riff on that element of the audience.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” provided some specific challenges, “because I wanted to do it as straight as possible, and have all of the elements intact, because I really do consider it to be a classical composition in many ways,” says Lams. “It goes to a lot of different places, musically, and it allows us to use this technique we’ve developed, which we call ‘circulation,’ where the pass a note around between us, very rapidly.
“It’s interesting to see how different people relate to our performance of that song, because if we play it for older people, like senior citizens, who don’t know it’s a Queen song, they’ll think we’re playing an arrangement of an opera piece, because it really is very operatic.
“And then the next day, we’ll play a show at a high school, and the kids are all jokingly bopping their heads to the uptempo sections, like in ‘Wayne’s World.’
“And we also love playing (Pink Floyd’s) ‘Echoes’ for older audiences. Two years ago, we played that at a show for a group of older people, and afterward, a 90-year-old lady came up and said that when we were playing that, the way we do, with the three acoustic guitars, she thought she was in heaven.”
Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.
California Guitar Trio performing live last summer: