Reason to fret at brave guitar concert

True, the electric guitar and its relatives offer almost infinite timbral and dynamic possibilities for composers of so-called “serious” music. But -- and this is crucial -- you need good musical ideas to carry these experiments forward, and you need an inviting, sympathetic environment in which to present them.

These elements were, for the most part, absent from a brave concert Saturday night titled “(Un-)Mapping the Electric Guitar.”

The concert was held in Eagle Rock’s Center for the Arts, a small, rectangular, inadequately ventilated room -- and the place was packed with the curious, seated in traditional rows of chairs with some sprawl on the sides.

Formal seating seemed wrong for this brand of ambient, meditative music. Perhaps rugs, mats and pillows would have created a more relaxing environment. Not only that, the harsh outside world of sirens and revved-up engines on Colorado Boulevard kept interfering with the sounds; one could take a passive, accepting attitude toward the passing parade in the spirit of John Cage for only so long.

In other words, it was a trial for the ear and the nervous system.

The wah-wah pedal-induced haze and rapid tappings and pluckings of Michael Jon Fink’s “Small Dreams in Red/For Sonny Sharrock” were obviously a tribute to the idiosyncratic style of Sharrock, the avant-garde jazz guitarist best known for sending shock waves through recordings by Miles Davis and Herbie Mann. Jeremy Drake’s interminable untitled exercise in feedback was followed by Rick Cox’s “maria falling away,” whose stroked, ghostly drifting voices often found themselves drowning in feedback.

Matters didn’t improve much in the early going of the concert’s second half, through Karl Montevirgen’s spare, quiet experiments in attacks in “Heraclitean Meditations” and even sparser pinpoints of sound that dotted Michael Pisaro’s “black, white, red, green, blue.”

At long last, in Chas Smith’s “From Absence,” some arresting sounds emerged from a most unorthodox source. They came from a strange, homemade instrument, a pedal steel guitar outfitted with tiny metal rods sticking straight up that, when struck or bowed, produced tolling chimes of haunting electronic beauty.

Smith’s music has been compared to that of Gyorgy Ligeti -- and the analogy holds up, for Smith’s drifting clouds of sound have much in common with those of Ligeti.

But when the overlong piece finally ended, it faded into the unwelcome buzz saw of a police helicopter circling the neighborhood.