Threedom of expression

Drunks say the darndest things.

It was while on tour last year in Cleveland that Rhys Chatham got fresh inspiration to revisit one of his most influential pieces. Chatham, who pretty much invented the concept of the guitar army while gigging around New York in the mid-’70s, was leading his latest ensemble, the Essentialist—which adapts the intoxicating harmonic overload of his compositions to the lethal riffage and stoner drone of metal influences like Slayer and Earth. As the band chimed into a crunchier version of Chatham’s 1977 signature piece “Guitar Trio,” one fan erupted into a frenzy. Besotted on more than the music, he began shouting: “‘Guitar Trio’ is my life!” And so a new tour was born.

“It became our motto,” says David Daniell, the Chicago guitarist who has been working with Chatham since they met at South by Southwest in 2006. He’s the single musician who is playing every date on Chatham’s 12-city “G3” tour, which arrives in Chicago next week. As the tour moves from city to city, Chatham will be joined by different ensembles, drawn from the local scene. It’s a system that worked wonders for more complex projects, such as A Crimson Grail (Moves Too Fast To See), which Chatham wrote for 400 guitarists and performed in Paris in 2005. And as Daniell suggests, the beauty of “G3” is its utmost simplicity.

“It’s a great framework and so simple structurally,” says Daniell, who will play alongside half a dozen players, including Tortoise stalwarts John McEntire, Jeff Parker and Doug McCombs. “It’s one chord. But from that one chord so much happens. It’s about taking a very coherent, simple idea and pushing it to an extreme where you realize that simple idea is not so simple, after all. It’s great how it’s just one chord, and it’s huge.”

Chatham—a protégé of Glenn Gould and former student of LaMonte Young and Morton Subotnick—was already shaking things up in 1971, when as a 19-year-old he initiated the music program at the Kitchen, the New York multimedia arts space. After he saw the Ramones at CBGB, he quickly plugged into the jackknife vigor of punk rock, and began writing pieces for multiple guitarists—including a pre–Sonic Youth Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, and the artist Robert Longo. As befit the times, Chatham’s performances arose from a blurry downtown scene in which all kinds of sounds were in constant collision: the no-wave skronk of the Contortions, the street funk of ESG, early hip-hop, free jazz and underground disco. When you listen to a vintage recording of “G3,” such as the one compiled on the box set An Angel Moves Too Fast to See (Table of the Elements), you’re hearing an aural snapshot of an amazingly fertile time and place. What’s splendid about the “G3” 30th-anniversary tour is how the original piece has grown to reflect the moment. It’s kept vibrant by the new generation of guitarists in Chatham’s ever-widening circle, which now spans art-rockers from Sonic Youth to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, whose members will perform at the Montreal event.

“When you stumble onto something truly magical, you don’t let it go,” says Chatham, who will record each show for a “best-of ‘G3’” box set, and will finish work on the Essentialist’s debut release, which was recorded in Chicago. “Perhaps it has to do with the universality of the overtones we are working with, the way their eternal quality speaks to just about everyone, combined with a driving rock rhythm, which also has a certain universality to it.”

At 54, “The Rhyster,” as his MySpace friends know him, has become an avuncular sonic guru, attracting devotees who were barely born when he relocated to France in the early 1990s. “He’s really important,” Daniell says. “If in 1991 I had gone to one of his performances, it would have totally blown me away. The music is fun to play—really, really exciting. It’s 30 years after ‘G3’ was first performed, and it’s really great to bring it to people who have never experienced it firsthand.”

Often, those people are the very guitarists playing the piece. Backstage at a recent show, Daniell was amused to hear about a request for a notated musical score. “Okay, here’s your sheet music,” he says, laughing. “It’s ‘E.’”

Chatham and others perform “Guitar Trio” at Empty Bottle February 8.