JAZZ REVIEW : Guitarist DeArango Plus Three

There was a strange kind of comeback at the Comeback Inn Wednesday. Bill DeArango, a guitarist once prominent on 52nd Street during the bop years in New York City but long out of the jazz mainstream, surfaced here a few weeks ago and made his local debut at the Venice health food haven.

Once heard on records or in clubs with Dizzy Gillespie, Terry Gibbs and Ben Webster, DeArango earned a place among the vanguard of be-boppers on his instrument. The quartet he led on this occasion, however, seemed to be straining to avoid an association with that straight-ahead jazz idiom.

For a while it seemed as though an attempt was under way to step into the worlds of modality and new age music. David Witham on piano, Bob Bowman on bass and Paul Kreibich on drums wandered through this territory while DeArango spent much of his time fixing strings, adjusting parts with a screwdriver, and occasionally leading into fragments of “Lover Man” and other standards.

While Witham was paying his mitigated respects to “What Is This Thing Called Love,” DeArango broke out a second guitar, but still seemed unsatisfied. He laid out during much of “ ‘Round Midnight” but seemed to be coming to terms with it during a closing chorus, though there was minimal rhythmic unity within the group.

“All or Nothing at All,” written years before Witham was born, seemed unfamiliar to him. In fact, given DeArango’s distinguished background, he might have been much better off opting for companions of his own generation instead of trying to cross thresholds into areas that seemed to provoke confusion rather than inspire innovation.