O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Fripp Gets Audience in Mood for Guitar Trio

One measure of true devotion in a teacher is a willingness to be outshone by a pupil.

Robert Fripp went out of his way to meet that measure Saturday night at the Coach House. Alternating segments with the California Guitar Trio, a group formed by young disciples of his “Guitar Craft” teaching method, the acclaimed and exacting English guitarist played slow, demanding, difficult-to-absorb mood music. That made the trio’s winning, energetic and highly accessible turns a welcome relief, and therefore all the more crowd-pleasing, and all the more rapturously received.

Fripp’s performance of long, ambient, electronic pieces dubbed “Soundscapes” seemed designed to test--in a literally didactic sense--his fans’ patience. This impressionistic music, performed solo and created with an electric guitar and a bevy of tape loops and electronic effects, unfolded at an almost glacial pace, and must have seemed utterly uneventful for any listener not willing to work to absorb it and expend some imaginative energy on it.

Fripp, 48, was close-cropped, bespectacled and, as usual, clad in black. He also was as silent and austere as a Zen master, as usual. He seemed not at all interested in entertaining but very interested in setting an exercise for his audience: In a hurried era when few of us have the time or the discipline to sit still and really concentrate on seeing a landscape or a vista and its changing shape over time, would we be able to connect with an aural evocation of such a scene?

(Discipline, by the way, is one of Fripp’s favorite words: It was the name he chose for a 1981 album by his venerable, on-again-off-again progressive-rock band King Crimson, and for his self-sustaining record company).

He couldn’t have had any illusions about the challenge posed by his Soundscapes. In his notes to “1999,” an album of his first Soundscapes performances, given last year in Argentina, Fripp recounts, with typical drollery, the outcome of one show:

“This was followed by a noisy expression of complaint from some 20 members of the audience--a quiet riot, it was said at the time. A TV news crew even arrived to film the disturbance. Several among the complainants demanded back their money--to compensate for the poor quality of the performance. . . . “

The Coach House crowd didn’t react all that badly. A few people voted with their feet after two innings of alternating Fripp Soundscapes and Guitar Trio music, not wanting to stick around for a third round of Fripp. Others murmured and yakked as Fripp returned for succeeding rounds, and had to be shushed by their more conscientious neighbors. One or two fellows off to one side of the room voiced their disapproval out loud (but not loudly enough to show the courage of their convictions), softly calling out “boring” or, as the trio departed and Fripp returned, “more of the other guys.”

But there was generally polite applause for Fripp’s experiments, which he carried out with much tapping of foot pedals, twiddling of knobs on an electronic console, and even some actual guitar playing. Not that any of it sounded like guitar playing. It was all orchestral textures, whooshing wind effects, spacey music of the spheres and swells of synthesized sound.

It went slowly. Pieces generally lasted 10 to 13 minutes while unfolding with much repetition. But most of it did go somewhere. We were treated to a sea excursion, moving from stately, rolling wave action to a suddenly rising typhoon, complete with stereophonic wind blasts. Another piece was a gurgling exploration of subaquatic spheres that at times evoked a playful swim with dolphins. There was a meditative, orchestral moment of splendor in a cathedral, and a tedious sci-fi sojourn that sounded like an attempt to write a new score to “Forbidden Planet.” Fripp’s concluding opus was full of building portents that crested in a sustained epiphany of soaring, shimmering sound. At least these were one person’s impressions.

Paul Winter, with acoustic instruments, and Tangerine Dream, with even more electronics than Fripp, have made similar forays into sound-painting, with mixed results. For Fripp, Soundscapes is the latest tangent in a 26-year recording career that has had as many asides as a Shakespearean comedy (among them have been collaborations with Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, David Sylvian and, most surprising but perhaps most delightful, the quirkily humorous Roches, whose first two albums Fripp produced). For most listeners, Soundscapes might be worth hearing once, just for the experience. After that, aside is where it should go.

For Fripp fans, the main event is the awaited emergence of the reformed King Crimson, which is expected this year after the release last year of a comeback EP, “Vrooom,” as an appetizer.

We’re also waiting to see which hip young alternative noisemakers will have the good taste and commercial savvy to cover Crimson’s 1969 sonic blast of fear and loathing, “21st Century Schizoid Man.” It’s a natural for end-of-the-millennium exploitation by Trent Reznor, Soundgarden, or some other wired yowler. The original recording stands as proof that Fripp deserves mention along with Neil Young as an early explorer of the noisy, dissonant possibilities of rock guitar that have grown so important in today’s “alternative” aesthetic.

While their teacher tested the crowd’s patience, his proteges in the California Guitar Trio succeeded thoroughly in entertaining it. The players, Bert Lams, Paul Richards and Hideyo Moriya, came on after Fripp’s opening salvo of puzzlement and played a tight, vibrant and engaging sequence of acoustic guitar music that everybody got and relished.

They began with the bopping “Yamanashi Blues,” then went into “Train to Lamy,” an expansive Great Plains suite. It opened with a delicious fuzz-tone slide guitar leading a high-kicking charge that recalled old Moby Grape. The piece eventually subsided into a fetchingly dusty and sentimental Mexican teardrop ballad. The trio capped its 15-minute first round with a grand arrangement and performance of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D-minor.”

The two subsequent Guitar Trio turns included more demanding, progressive-leaning fare but also made room for such accessible nuggets as Ennio Morricone’s theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and a bouncing, lighthearted country rag to end the 100-minute show.

Book-ending the concert were a processional and recessional in which Fripp, who is big on drill and ceremony, marched into the crowd with the Guitar Trio and joined them in unamplified acoustic guitar pieces that had the fast, ticking, abuzz-in-the-beehive crosscurrents of much of his work with the 17-member League of Crafty Guitarists ensemble that grew out of his Guitar Craft courses a few years ago.

Boosted by the strength of a performance that seemed even more inviting given the stern lesson their teacher was conducting, the California Guitar Trio could generate enough of a buzz to let loose the master’s coattails and return in the future as headliners in their own right.