WAYNE RIKER TRIO: Blues Breakout

Longtime San Diego guitar stalwart Wayne Riker is a very fine musician, a fretster with enviable finesse, fire, and fluidity who’s had his skills showcased in many ways, in big band setups, country outfits, coffeehouse duos, straight blues bands, and more besides. Lately, he’s been pushing the guitar up front with the Wayne Riker Trio, a blues threesome tht make the objects in the room shake with a simple formula: while bassist John Simons and drummer Walt Riker provide the steady, earnest, and unflinching rhythmic backbone, lead guitarist Wayne lets it fly, unleashed.

Their new album, Blues Breakout, is literally a series of five extended guitar improvisations, each in a different groove, style, and tempo, steadily maintained by the solid rhythm section in unflinching precision while Wayne fills in all the available space. There is a lot of space to fill, but Riker is one of those seasoned players who has listened broadly– traces of BB King, Chet Atkins, Jimi Hendrix, and Joe Pass reveal themselves in Riker’s cascading phrases–and assimilated the variety into a sweetly swift and effortless style. On “Black and Blue Boogie,” the guitarist starts his soloing out the gate, rapid-fire runs dancing along the unyielding precision of the bass and drums, with Riker inserting punishing blues bends that snarl and growl as the mood demands and alternating his approach with each chorus he takes. A jazzy sting of notes is quickly followed by some clean, pointillistic bluegrass/country playing, followed again by some marvelous juxtaposition amongst a swampy, bassy sound, a low E-string thump, and casually executed ostinatos, sustained notes that keep all this busy virtuosity in line with certain vocal quality that might otherwise be lacking.

My favorite performance among the five tracks is “Bleeding Blue,” a six-minute slow blues that highlights Riker’s superb sense of nuance and phrase-making in a 12-bar format. He is not one of those players who plays a phrase and will pause before he plays another. Like the critically under-rated Johnny Winter, Riker follows one idea with another, shifting rhythmic emphasis and varying the voicings of the finite form to create tension. His lines are rapid, precise, but never sterile. His ideas cascade gloriously until you think his virtuosity will overwhelm everything else, but there is a canny sense of pacing here. When you suspect he’s run of ideas, new, fresh variations are sounded. Blues Breakout is more or less a one-man show, with the rhythm section being relegated to maintaining a solid grounding for Riker’s pyrotechnical exuberance. One might wish for stronger song orientation, some vocals, and less showing off. I am pleased Riker chooses to show us what he can do, uncorked, a guitarist unchained.