L'ombra Di Verdi

This is guitarist and composer Marc Ducret doing what he does best: playing in an electric trio setting and redefining the place of the electric guitar is postmodern music. Accompanied here by Bruno Chevillon on double bass and Eric Echampard on drums, Ducret goes after the guitar's linguistic sensibilities: its syntax in improvisation and place of emphasis, "speech," "song," and nuance in the setting of an improvisational trio. On "Dialectes," he states his case early on, melding shimmering single-string phrases with open chords until Echampard enters with a syncopated polyrhythmic line of fire. From here, it's ostinato in overdrive as two tones alternate for domination with one another, not exactly in counterpoint, but in consonance with the rhythmic attack. For over 15 minutes, Ducret plays against his own phrases, culminating and condensing his cadenza-styled approach into a force that moves against stasis in the phrase, à la Jimi Hendrix. On "Lust," a remake of an earlier solo track, Ducret moves the entire intonation angle over into another dimension by treating the guitar's chorded rhythm patterns as if they were played in the tonal territory of a zither. As Chevillon engages with slapped rhythm and pizzicato inversions, creating intervals between Ducret's statements, the guitarist moves over one and shuttles the interval into a scalar figure, moving through a modal, deep-hued blues and then into a spare yet pronounced chromatic angularism that is reminiscent of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." Turning anywhere for a kind of solace or comfort, to find the guitar in a place that is familiar and sonant as itself, one is upended, displaced by Ducret's metalingual commentary on the guitar as somehow more and less than itself in musical, particularly improvisational and jazz, discourse. There are plenty of overdriven, volume-screeching attacks and stun-like power chords here, albeit designed in different modular contexts, but all of them add up to the same thing: In Ducret's virtuoso hands and mind, the electric guitar is an instrument that hasn't yet begun to be tapped for its timbral or phraseological potential.