The music business has never quite known what to make of Gary Lucas. But that’s what happens when you’ve played guitar with everyone from Captain Beefheart to Leonard Bernstein (on his “Mass”), and your tastes and itinerary take you as far afield as Poland, China, Spain, Israel, India and Cuba.
“I like and like doing all kinds of music, and that’s been a blessing and a curse, but I’ll accept that,” Mr. Lucas said in advance of the release of “The Ordeal of Civility,” his new CD. “I look at myself as a global citizen: it’s a big old world out there, and I don’t want to be restricted.”
For much of his career, Mr. Lucas, 58, has operated out of the spotlight, initially as a guitarist in the avantgarde Beefheart ensemble, and in the early 1990s as the writer of a dozen songs with Jeff Buckley, the best known of which are “Grace” and “Mojo Pin.” But among music professionals, he has long been held in high esteem.
“Gary Lucas may well be the greatest living electric guitarist,” said the psychologist Daniel Levitin, a former recording engineer for the Grateful Dead and Santana. “I find a great combination of lyricism and exoticism in his playing.”
Though passionate about the guitar, which he plays left-handed, since his childhood, Mr. Lucas did not perform full time until he was nearly 40. For more than a dozen years, he worked at Columbia Records, mostly as an ad copywriter. He also managed Captain Beefheart for part of that time, before joining that band and gaining renown for his rendering of a notoriously difficult instrumental piece.
Hal Willner , a producer, has known Mr. Lucas since those Columbia days in the 1970s. When he finally saw Mr. Lucas play, it came as a shock and a revelation.
Mr. Willner, who described Mr. Lucas as a creator of “futuristic roots music,” said Mr. Lucas “can quote from Stravinsky and Howlin’ Wolf and put them together to make his own sound.”.
Besides performing on electric, Mr. Lucas also plays acoustic guitar, his favorite being a steel-body National. In both formats, he strives for a sound that might be called music from the Delta - both the Mississippi and the Ganges.
“I love drones and the deep, hypnotic grooves they can produce,” he said. “It’s the mother source of music, and most of the music I really like, whether Miles or Coltrane’s modal stuff, Indian or Jewish or African music, springs from that. ”
One recent recording, “Rishte,” is a collaboration in that style with the Muslim Anglo-Pakistani ghazal singer Najma Akhtar. Another project, “The Edge of Heaven,” is a bluesified rendering of mid-20thcentury Chinese pop songs; Mr. Lucas has also made several records that draw on Jewish themes and traditional styles like klezmer.
“I’m a Jewish person who is very proud of his heritage ,” said Mr. Lucas, who grew up in New York, studied English at Yale University and now lives in Manhattan’s West Village.
For the last 20 years, perhaps the only constant in Mr. Lucas’s musical life has been his rock group, Gods and Monsters.
The title of the new CD, “The Ordeal of Civility,” comes from a 1974 book whose subtitle refers to “the Jewish struggle with modernity.” To Mr. Lucas’s friends, that’s just one more indication of the diversity of his interests.
“It’s not a pretentious thing ,” Mr. Willner said. “He’s just scary literate about all kinds of film and poetry and ideas.”
Mr. Lucas’s most recent project is a collaboration with Cuban musicians. He has been recording in Havana with members of Los Van Van and two daughters of Pablo Milanes’s, reworking some of his older compositions to see how they sound when “Cubanized.”
Lenny Kaye has been Patti Smith’s guitarist for 40 years and has also played with Mr. Lucas . “Gary is a friend to improvisation,” he said. “Once you get him in a wild card situation where anything goes, anything does go.”
By LARRY ROHTER
