Things we like: Extended Guitar Trio, Ava Mendoza, MSSV

Guitars, guitars, guitars. So many styles, approaches, players. So many records. In a perfect universe (which we all know doesn't exist), I would have pubbed this before last Friday (which was Bandcamp Friday). Oh well. Better late than never. Here are three I dig...

New Yorker Nick Didkovsky's axe has made its mark in hard rock, metal, RIO-esque prog, and computer-aided modern compositions. He's the only musician I'm aware of who's played with Alice Cooper, Fred Frith, and Hugh Hopper, but he's also played free improv in outfits like Zinc Nine Psychedelic and Eris 136199. Last October, he traveled to Germany to perform in the Extended Guitar Trio with longtime collaborators Erhard Hirt and Hans Tammen. The results have been released, digitally and on CD, as MUNSTER 02 OCT 24. The four pieces collected here require multiple attentive listens to hear all that's happening. In these three-way conversations, the corporeality of fingers on strings collides with the sci-fi futurism of electronic sounds that are barely recognizable as guitar, all rendered in extreme close-up fidelity. (This would be a good one to listen to through headphones.)

Speaking of Frith familiars, Ava Mendoza studied with the ex-Henry Cow composer and master improviser at Mills College, and participated in a performance of his Gravity album that's YouTube available. Since then, she's performed with the likes of William Parker, William Hooker, and Bill Orcutt, and led her own groups (Unnatural Ways, Mendoza Hoff Revels), but my favorite Ava is solo Ava (dig her New Spells from 2021 on Relative Pitch). Now she's got a new solo disc, The Circular Train, on Orcutt's Palilalia label. I've always dug the rock grit in Mendoza's tone, and here her electronically juiced modal explorations, haunting/haunted vocals, and root source-rich song forms come together in a way that really signifies (imagine a Latina amalgam of Richard Thompson and Old Neil with a soupcon of punk rage and you're in the neighborhood). Plus she caps it off with a gorgeously tough-as-nails instrumental version of Lead Belly's "Irene, Goodnight" that's worth the price of admission all by itself. For now, this is where I'll go when I want to hear Mendoza at her finest.

 

Punk eminence Mike Watt has always had good taste in guitar players, from d. boon and Ed Crawford to Nels Cline (whom I heard for the first time on the first two Watt solo discs), Joe Baiza, and a couple of Stooges. His current trio, MSSV, finds him in harness with his Porno For Pyros/Banyan bandmate Stephen Perkins on drums and Knoxville-based jazzer Mike Baggetta on guitar. Punk-jazz has really come to the fore in the last couple of years, what with the aforementioned Mendoza Hoff Revels and the Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis treading the boards, and MSSV's third album, On and On, shows them to be masters of the art. Baggetta sings at least as well as Ed Crawford, but his playing is a real revelation -- from the same post-Hendrix/Sharrock school of skronk as, say, Epitaph era Wayne Kramer, but with even more freewheeling melodic imagination, textural variety, and sonic daring. I've been listening to the digital version, but am awaiting the LP, which features additional improv interludes. Can't wait to hear these cats at The Wild Detectives on March 22 (on a bill with Austin's THC Trio and my favorite band of the moment, Trio Glossia, augmented for the occasion by my favorite guitarist, Gregg Prickett).