California Guitar Trio, Live At The Key Club

The California Guitar Trio have been busy touring with the prolific Tony Levin once more along for the ride (King Crimson and a million more...), and this CD is an invite to the party. The guitar playing is technically superb, and much colour is added with judicious use of effects, whilst Pat Mastelotto beefs the sound up with his typically solid drumming. The repertoire shows off the CGT's ample prog-rock song writing skills, but also return to their roots with a couple of Robert Fripp covers. The working of Dance Of Maya[sic] is a better recording than on their previous live album, Monday Night in San Francisco: CGT Direct Collectors' Series, Volume 1. But, like that version, this potential space voyager never seems to lift far off the ground, before the track glides into an irrelevant vamp to replace JM's original guitar solo at around 4 minutes, and crashes back to earth with an inelegant chord dump, rather than the uplifting death strains of the original.

The CGT soloing that is on this track is impressive like the rest of the album, but sometimes you feel the performance lacks soul and simply demonstrates the latest hardware. Perhaps something more dynamic could be created if each of the CGT had their own voice to add, rather than sounding so similar. However, the Yes song Heart Of The Sunrise does provide a platform for more exciting interplay in the group, and Caravan is a fascinating arrangement of Duke Ellington's 1937 Latino classic, that at times even captures his swinging orchestration. The album contains a touch too much country-influenced picking for personal taste, but the enthusiasm of the audience would clearly put me in the minority. Personal bias aside, the cover of the public-pleasing Apache with the mandatory yeehaws from the crowd borders on the trite and delivers an undeserved pastiche of the highly skilled and very entertaining CGT.