I met up Friday night with jazz buddies Seth and Greg and George and Denny to see the California Guitar Trio play at Water Street. As I've said before¹, if they are ever in your area, you've got to check them out.

They played a couple of Bach pieces, a surf-guitar version of Beethoven's Fifth, a more straight-up version of LvB's Pastorale Sonata,'Classical Gas,' 'Sleepwalk' (a maddeningly familiar slide guitar tune that took me an hour or so to discover the name of), 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' a blending of 'Ghost Riders in the Sky' and 'Riders on the Storm', and several originals. One of those original tunes, 'Andromeda,' blew my socks off. It started off with a thick wash of complex texture punctuated with rock guitar-like flourishes, moved into an almost Steve-Reich-ish space with two of the guitars phasing with each other (at least that's what I think I heard), and finished off with a a more placid and melodic prog-rockish solo backed by a Fripp-like wall of sound. I sounds kind of hokey now that I've written it all down, and I don't think I've done it any kind of justice, but the effect was mesmerizing.

But you don't have to take my word for it. You can hear a brief concert recorded for Philadelphia public radio that includes many of these songs; 'Andromeda' starts at about the 24:45 minute mark.

Afterwards, Seth, Greg, and I, not willing yet to call it a night, headed over to the Strathallan to catch Bob Sneider's second set. Bob's jazz guitar was a perfect nightcap to the varied and free-ranging guitars of the california Guitar Trio.

UPDATE: Holy crap, I forgot about Freebird! The final encore and show closer was Freebird! Only one cigarette lighter was lit, as far a I could tell.