It's a pleasurable rarity when a group of innovators inexplicably find each other and
ride an as yet un-done musical wavelength into the future, and thus define a new genre
before it can even be named. The Mahavishnu Orchestra did it for fusion, The Flecktones
for newgrass, and now the California Guitar Trio is doing it for... well, whatever this
brand of sublime acoustic prog-rock might be dubbed by yet-to-blossom talking heads.
"The First Decade" recapitulates the CGT's journey, via a "best-of" collection, over the
last ten years from the group's beginnings as an outgrowth of Robert Fripp's Guitar Craft
course in 1987. Three of the international participants in that course were destined to
become the CGT: Bert Lams from Belgium, Hideyo Moriya from Japan, and Paul Richards from
the U.S. They clicked, stumbling onto an unlikely common ground for their diverse
backgrounds in classical music (Lams), rock and jazz (Richards), and surf music (Moriya),
later taking their unique sonic conglomerate of three acoustic guitars to be heard by
astonished worldwide audiences, backing up Fripp's League of Crafty Guitarists, then later
King Crimson and John McLaughlin. Not surprisingly, "The First Decade" might fit neatly
into Fripp label Discipline Global Mobile's catalogue -- the music has the necessary
requisites of rhythmic and melodic complexity, spacey ambience and innovative edginess.
The fare ranges from free-form and schizophreniform ("Happy Time in Fun Town"), Hawaiian
("Train to Lamy Pt 5"), industrial surf ("Yamanashi Blues" and "Beeline"), raga
("Melrose Avenue"), Steve Tibbettsian ambient ("Punta Patri" and "Above the Clouds"),
Spanish ("Arroyo"), neoclassical ("Great Divide") to Mahavishnian Japanese folk
("Invitation"). Hmmm... on second thought, maybe this genre will never be named.
