POP MUSIC REVIEW : Ex-Cop Hits Mark When Doing Fusion

Ex-Policeman Andy Summers’ current music, all of it vocal-less, falls in the netherworld cracks somewhere between new age and jazz fusion. His latest album, “The Golden Wire,” veers more toward the former, but his band’s performance of the same songs Tuesday at the Strand in Redondo Beach, happy to say, had more of the spirit of the latter genre--tougher, tenser, rockier, more stinging (no pun intended).

The esteemed guitarist will be bringing his band to Orange County tonight with a headlining appearance at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

On the new record (his second instrumental release for the Private Music label after a brief, failed fling with a solo vocal rock career), Summers tends to opt for the “ambient”--i.e., somnambulistic--approach, just right for a wine-and-cheese party but not appropriate for a your-attention- please club showcase.

Live, he’s wisely put a lot more rock fire and kick into the erstwhile mellow music, partly by hiring an electronic percussionist and a very busy kit drummer to replace the tentative drum programming that is the album’s sorriest feature. This was most evident on the LP’s title song, which starts as an acoustic solo number and kicks into a syncopated band jumper; on record you hardly notice the shift, but in concert the dynamics came through.

At its best, Summers’ elixir suggests some kind of ‘90s lounge music, with lounge not necessarily used as a pejorative; the expansiveness and aggressiveness of the music seemed just right at times for the relaxed, open spaces of the Redondo Beach club.

The guitarist works with a wider palette now than he did with the Police, both in music styles (Tuesday’s concert ran the gamut from Indian-influenced riffing to reggae) and guitar styles; he still favors those muddled, muffled riffs and plenty of delay and reverb but also working in some clearer, ringing tones along the way. His finest moments would come when, after spending minutes humbly and unassumedly establishing the melody, he would cut himself loose from it or go against its grain entirely. During one rocker he let fly some tremolo bar effects that seemed to be in some kind of wild aural 3-D.

Yet the band--expert players all--was almost never encouraged to go with him on these excursions, and even Summers would quickly return from his dissonant flights of fancy to the basic structure of the song. Which isn’t bad, but it makes one wonder whether Summers’ talents might still not be best applied to fusion, the full risks of which he seems wary to take, than to good old vocal pop songs, in the context of which his brief off-kilter explosions have always sounded incendiary indeed.