Andrew McKenna Lee@ Joe’s Pub

Classical guitar can be a dicey proposition (I have no idea why that is so; someone far more learned than me, perhaps classical-guitar genius David Leisner, could explain the reason or, more likely, completely refute my “hypothesis”), but I saw a show on Friday night at the jazz-nightclubby venue Joe’s Pub that completely upended my vague, ill-thought-out preconceptions about the guitar’s “place” in classical music. Andrew McKenna Lee, a composer and guitarist very active on the New York new-music scene, performed a set of his music both with the ensemble the Janus Trio and then alone.

The work he performed with Janus, titled “Dark Out of the Nighttime,” was an impressive piece all by itself that found a lot of sonic middle ground between the upper registers of a harp and the guitar, sometimes intermingling the two textures to the point that you weren’t sure which plinking was emanating from which instrument. One listen while trying to flag down the waitress who is supposedly bringing your glass of wine (and after two glasses already) is never an ideal state to take in a new work, so I can’t exactly speak AUTHORITATIVELY about it’s structure, but it was a surging, brooding work I want to hear again.

After that, though, Andrew played solo, and that constituted the most dazzling portion of the evening. He opened with the title track off his brand-new record Gravity and Air, on New Amsterdam Records, eloquently explaining the title as representing the anchoring, strophic bass line (gravity) and the dancing filigree way up on the guitar’s neck (air). What impressed me most was the amount of textures Lee pulled out of the guitar — rough, sensual sounds, full of percussive tapping and scraping strings; thick strumming; startlingly loud plunks done with the thumb; and lilting, flamenco-ish finger-picking.

He played a few other pieces, including an epic, variations-and-deconstruction based on a Bach Prelude that opens the disc, and it was truly a captivating show. Listening to the CD is inevitably a less visceral experience than seeing Andrew live, but I recommend it heartily. If you are a fan at all of solo acoustic guitar, than this should shoot right up to the top of your list.

After Andrew, the new-music group QQQ performed, but I did not make it through to hear it; their debut record, Unpacking the Trailer, is also on eMusic. I listened this weekend, and it felt, to me, like a lot of new indie-classical hybrids: pretty enough, with interesting moments, but somewhat vague and inconsequential. Then again, I seem to have a stick up my ass for this stuff; Hauschka, who I find to be a similarly aimless song-doodler, is a huge hit on eMusic, and Alex loves him. Try the track “Spring” on this one to see if it’s your bag.