Weekend Review : Pop and Music : A Confusing Yet Fascinating Set From Ritenour

Lee Ritenour opened the Pasadena Jazz Festival at the Ambassador Auditorium on Saturday with a program that illustrated the full creative range of this hard-working guitarist.

Once one of L.A.’s most sought-after studio players, more recently associated with such hyphenates as funk-jazz and blues-rock, Ritenour has slowly begun in the past few years to integrate his diverse skills as he reaches for a musical singularity--one that holds great promise for him as an artist.

The problem with this particular outing, however, was that Ritenour too often fell back on old habits, once again trying to be too many things to too many styles.

When pianist Billy Childs was in the rhythm section for such numbers as “Stolen Moments,” Ritenour’s jazz lines glowed with improvisatory imagination. When Phil Perry (he of the impossibly high falsetto voice) was singing “It Might Be You,” Ritenour was the perfect accompanist. When tenor saxophonist Eric Marienthal (a Charlie Ventura for the ‘90s) was building his frenetic climaxes, Ritenour was down and dirty funky.

The result was a sometimes confusing, if always fascinating, display of multiple musical personalities. Clearly Ritenour can do almost anything he wants musically. But he will be a more effective and convincing artist when he completes the task of combining his many musical identities into a focused aesthetic expression.