JAZZ REVIEW : Singer Outshines Guitar Kings at JVC Show

Sunday night’s JVC Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl concert was billed--inaccurately, as it turned out--as a “Guitar Explosion!” There were, indeed, plenty of guitarists on hand, including Larry Coryell, Al DiMeola, Lee Ritenour and B. B. King, but most of a long evening’s short moments of detonation were supplied, surprisingly, by singer Phil Perry.

Working first as soloists, then as a duo, Coryell and DiMeola opened the program with typically energetic numbers demonstrating, with painstaking thoroughness, that rapid fingers do not necessarily make for heartfelt music.

Coryell’s odd solo guitar arrangement of excerpts from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” for example, was a technical tour de force, obviously difficult to play, but ultimately a curiosity piece rather than a creative accomplishment.

DiMeola’s set quivered with Latin accents and the faint, hovering sound of Flamenco, yet, as with Coryell, it did not come into focus as anything more than a series of very difficult mechanical exercises.

An overly long program by Ritenour (featuring saxophonist Ernie Watts) at least had the benefit of the leader’s brightly melodic lines. Even better, Watts played with his familiar whoops and shouts and effectively emphasized the strong blues qualities of his improvisational style.

For the most part, however, the Ritenour performance had the efficient, but rather colorless quality of another day at the musical office until Perry arrived on stage.

Starting slowly with Ritenour’s “Harlequin,” the gospel-style singer electrified both the music and the audience with a startling reading of Dave Grusin’s ballad, “All of My Life.” It was the high point of the evening.

Blues guitarist and singer King, curiously placed in the headliner position of a program billed as a jazz concert, had few moments that reached Perry’s level of performance.

The strong, driving sense of swing that made King a blues original a decade ago was rarely in evidence. Devoting most of his set to novelties like “Let the Good Times Roll” and “Someone Really Loves You,” while playing remarkably little solo guitar, King clearly had entertainment on the mind.

Too bad. In his capable hands the evening’s promised guitar explosion might have been as exciting as this year’s Fourth of July fireworks. Unlike the holiday pyrotechnics, however, the guitar explosion never quite hit the flash point.

Attendance was 17,417.