JAZZ REVIEW : Lagrene’s Set a Portrait of Schizophrenia

Bireli Lagrene’s opening set at Catalina Bar & Grill Tuesday night was, during its better moments, a classic example of the inspirational global impact of American jazz.

Like Django Reinhardt, with whom the 26-year-old French guitarist has long been identified, Lagrene has brought a uniquely personal dialect to the music’s broad vocabulary. His present trio--with Chris Doky on bass and Joe Taylor on drums--is exploring that vocabulary via a collection of standard material, much of it drawn from Lagrene’s mainstream-oriented new album.

The result, despite Lagrene’s always remarkable playing, was a 90-minute program tinged with musical schizophrenia. On tunes such as “C’est Si Bon,” “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise,” Lagrene unfurled a brilliant array of technical skills--Wes Montgomery-like octaves, richly harmonized block chords, soaring singlenote lines.

But when Lagrene, who’s appearing through Sunday, fell back on funk-driven fusion from earlier albums, the more singular aspects of his playing seemed to fall away, replaced by too-familiar, high-decibel riffing. Nor was Lagrene aided by the thick-textured, intrusions of his drummer. As appropriate as Taylor’s work may have been for the fusion numbers, his failure to grasp the rhythmic subtleties of the mainstream pieces was a continuing distraction from the otherwise splendid efforts of Lagrene and Doky.