Guitar deflation

Guitarist Bill Frisell’s omnivorous musical appetite has created a remarkable career, embracing styles reaching across a wide spectrum of creative genres and resulting in winning a Grammy in the best contemporary jazz category earlier this year for the CD “Unspeakable.” His various ensembles include some of the music world’s most adept practitioners, and his own playing unhesitatingly blends jazz, blues, gospel, rock and various forms of electronic manipulation.

So when he showed up at the Jazz Bakery on Monday leading a classy trio that included organist Sam Yahel and drummer Brian Blade, it was no surprise that the venue was virtually sold out for two shows. What was surprising was the fact that the playing in the opening set was so pedestrian and predictable.

Frisell deserves credit for a program that had the audacity to include tunes by Bob Dylan and Thelonious Monk. But in these tunes, as elsewhere, the trio revealed too many signs of inadequate preparation and little evidence of intuitive musical interplay. The same was apparent in the open-ended, freely improvised passages, which tended to emerge as random collections of disjointed sound effects, occasionally enhanced by Frisell’s use of electronics that allowed him to multitrack his own lines.

Yahel’s efforts on a Hammond B-3 organ seemed limited to providing textural layers for Frisell’s ungainly guitar phrases. Blade, who can seemingly do no wrong in most circumstances, played with his familiar musicality and swing, but his stellar contributions had surprisingly little success in raising the level of a performance that promised far more than it delivered.