The Aristocrats
The Aristocrats

Introduction:

Aristocrats is an instrumental guitar/bass/drums trio. The genre is fusion. The three guys (ahem, almost fifty-year-olds today, though they don't show it) met in Los Angeles at a music fair nine years ago… someone brought them together on a stage for a jam session that ended up going on for over three hours: empathy, brotherhood, and passion ignited immediately.

The standout character is guitarist Guthrie Govan, simply the best living guitar player at the moment (setting aside the old sixties/seventies dinosaurs who are still around but more or less burnt out if not retired).

English, tall, thin, and with two large hands like Hendrix, a reddish and frizzy mane that is out of time for a metalhead, Govan is a living and astounding compendium of all human knowledge about the electric guitar, of everything that has been invented and developed on the six strings from Robert Johnson and B.B.King through to Clapton Page Beck Blackmore Fripp Gilmour and even Zappa Van Halen Satriani Vai Holdsworth. Traces of each of these can be imagined within every single track or solo. However, he composes his own style, intense yet virtuosic, derivative and yet peculiar.

All possible amplifier tones and settings, all string attacks with fingers and pick, with or without the tremolo bar, all touch nuances and execution speeds belong profoundly to this gentleman and yet, miracle!, alongside virtuosity and variety, there is an absolute intensity, both lyrical and melodic and sometimes even ironic. Govan is a juggling and at the same time “warm” guitarist, communicative, passionate. Every note he takes is not only precise and difficult and surprising, it is genuinely musical, intelligent, nourishing, cultured.

Perhaps I speak as a musician (albeit an amateur). Certainly, a certain technical experience allows you to better focus on what happens with the Aristocrats, but I am convinced that Govan's art is present and flourishing and evident to anyone who is not prejudiced and considers all virtuous music without heart.

But it's not that his two companions are just watching… the German drummer Marco Minneman is a perfect and enjoyable rhythm machine. Among other things, he flaunts a present and realistic sound at the highest level I know. His drums and cymbals are recorded (and hit…) with perfect naturalness… it feels like having him right in front of you, in the same room where you're listening.

The same goes for the American bassist Bryan Beller, another product of those high-level instrumental schools that rock has equipped itself with for a long time. Both melodic and driving, meticulously precise, he rightly favors deep and dark sounds for his amp, so as not to interfere with Guthrie's guitar, even in the most congested phases.

Context:

I was saying that the three met in 2011, liked each other and the enthusiasts present at that first joint session, and therefore decided to produce music together. A few months later, this album here was already ready, the first of four released so far. The immediately found chemistry and instrumental ability and precision meant that in fifteen days these nine tracks came out, perfectly arranged and textbook played, all three together with almost no overdubs.

Being all composers, they quickly and democratically chose three themes each from those at their disposal to give life to nine structured instrumentals roughly in the jazz manner: introduction, theme, variations, and solos, return to the theme, and conclusion.

Standout moments:

I only speak of my favorite track, the most exciting of the bunch, which is the concluding “Flatlands” (composed by bassist Beller): a slowly introduced arpeggio in a Pink Floyd style, not particularly poignant, but right after the track reaches a high with a sequence of expertly detached minor chords, bathed in chorus, occasionally moved by very light tremolo bar touches, virtuous vibratos, small connecting phrases.

Up until Govan's solo, with the same clean guitar sound, only slightly compressed and garnished with a touch of echo. Every note is taken with maximum care, the phrasing is not a sequence of licks but a speech, it goes from here to there, from up to down, it intensifies and thins out, it runs and brakes… it speaks!

Until he resumes the initial chord breaks, elegant and satisfying in their resolution into a major key after the sequence of minor keys… an old trick of many compositions, but always valid and perfect for our Western ears; the tension of the minor mode and the relief, the satisfaction of the transition to the major.

Final Verdict:

Music for musicians, first and foremost… or at least a certain “air of superiority” is needed to truly enjoy this stuff. Nothing elitist, I'm talking about a light snobbery, maybe intermittent… in the sense that right after you can make up for it with some nicely “poorly” played stuff, with all due respect, a’la Jefferson Airplane or Lou Reed or Bob Dylan.

Of course, the voice is missing, and music without singing and lyrics is always somehow lacking. Even if passionate and sparkling like this of the Aristocrats.