Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet's "Four Guitars Live"

Always late to the party, I've been aware of San Francisco guitar sage Bill Orcutt for over a decade, but I didn't take time to investigate his work until viewing the Tiny Desk Concert of his Guitar Quartet with Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parrish last spring -- which means I missed his solo stand at Rubber Gloves back in the summer of 2022 (my biggest missed concert regret of the current decade). My earliest exposure came in the form of acoustic versions of songs like "White Christmas," "Over the Rainbow," and "The Star Spangled Banner," played on a battered 4-string acoustic (in standard tuning, but missing the A and D strings, the low E string sometimes tuned up to G). This caused me to inaccurately peg Orcutt as a rustic eccentric in the mold of John Fahey, which he isn't -- not exactly. I also noted that he releases a lot of music on his Palilalia Records label, in small pressings which tend to sell out quickly and become difficult to obtain. (These days, I'm prone to buy any Bill Orcutt record I see.)

The music the Orcutt Guitar Quartet played for NPR was from his 2022 release Music for Four Guitars, on which Orcutt overdubs himself playing 14 short pieces on a 4-string Telecaster through a Fender amp. The music is rhythmically insistent and replete with spiky counterpoint, repurposing the syntax of blues-based rock guitar -- the drone-based modality, the hammer-ons and pull-offs -- into something entirely other, an engaging sound that, in its hypnotic repetition and metallic clangor, can be quite magnificent. Parish -- a folk-based player who also performs in the prog-punk band Ahleuchatistas -- transcribed the music from the album. Once he, Eisenberg, and Mendoza had familiarized themselves with the score (which required emulating Orcutt's guitar setup, and the occasional use of a capo), the four took it on the road last year, and Four Guitars Live was recorded on tour in Europe last November (a couple of weeks before I saw Eisenberg at Molten Plains Fest in Denton!). 

It's great to hear the interlocking parts going down in real time, and as Orcutt points out in one of his brief onstage raps, the concert is an hour, where the album was half that length, and they make up the difference by improvising. There are solo spots for all the players and a duet for Mendoza and Parish, the better to appreciate Orcutt's burbling bursts of melody, Eisenberg's classical fluidity and percussive right hand, Mendoza's blues grit and whammy bar fluency, and Parish's Celtic roots and penchant for atonality. The energy exchange with the audience is palpable in the music, and by the time they tear into "Barely driving" (an arrangement of "Barely Visible" and "Glimpsed While Driving" from Four Guitars) at the top of side D, you can feel them entering a rarefied realm of group interaction. Then Orcutt pulls out all the stops for the solo encore -- recorded at a different concert than the rest of the program, because you know he wanted us to have the best. 

Music for Four Guitars is an essential masterpiece, but I'm going to keep Four Guitars Live on the shelf with all my favorite electric guitar noises: Trout Mask Replica, Marquee Moon, my favorite live Richard Thompson and Funkadelic rides. Buy it for your pleasure, miss it at your peril.