Pop Music Reviews : Robert Fripp and his Crafty League at Bogart’s

For the last four years, Robert Fripp, the innovative guitarist noted for his work with King Crimson, collaborations with Brian Eno and his own brand of “Frippertonics,” has been conducting seminars and offering courses under the auspices of the West Virginia-based Guitar Craft Services. According to Fripp, more than 600 guitarists have taken these courses, many of them playing at one time or another in his performance group billed as “the League of Crafty Guitarists.”

There might have been only 14 musicians in the version of the League that played at Bogart’s on Wednesday night, but, together with Fripp, they made up for the other 586. With all musicians maintaining Fripp’s passively alert decorum, the League produced a stimulating, often startling array of voicings. With several guitarists doubling parts, playing tangent harmonies or utilizing rhythmic delays, the group had an orchestral timbre, its bass lines sometimes resembling the stops of a great cathedral organ.

Fripp’s music is rooted in European modernism: The compositions generally bypassed the more familiar guitar formulas (blues/country/rock), producing a cerebral collage of repetitious minor and augmented runs. At times it had the feel of harried insects working in a state of advanced anxiety, while other pieces had the lyrical lilt of complicated Irish jigs. One imagines that if the rhythms were written out, they’d resemble a sexy form of algebra.

Fripp and company’s splendid display of interval hopscotch was techniquely remarkable, sonically diverting and often just plain beautiful. The League’s Southern California swing was set to continue with shows Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, tonight at the Japan America Cultural Center in Los Angeles and Saturday at the Bacchanal in San Diego.