It was a hot and fleet-fingered night when Italian guitar wizard Matteo Mancuso graced the Lobero Theatre stage last week. It was a two-broken-string kind of night, to be exact. This seemed to come as a shock to the much buzzed-about 29-year-old Mancuso, whose unique and dazzlingly virtuosic style accentuates precision and fluidity of a seemingly otherworldly sort. After the second broken string, he smiled and shook his head, “This never happens to me.”
Must have been something in the Lobero air, or else he was extra-urgent on this night.
Mancuso has taken the guitar world by storm with his taste and technique, playing without a pick but drawing on his studies as a classical guitarist and with aspects of flamenco finger-work in his ultra-dexterous fashion. Blistering fast and fluent lines connect, with right hand hammer-ons woven into the gymnastic slaloming of fingering, but to ultimately musical ends. And to see the Mancuso phenom live, in the moment and in the room, especially a glorious intimate space like the Lobero, is something special to behold.
He is abetted by formidable young allies bassist Riccardo Oliva and drummer Gianluca Pellerito. Together, they are young neo-fusioneers in sweatshirts, calmly dispensing their eloquent musical furies seemingly without much effort or rock ‘n’ roll body language (although Oliva gets his moves on more than the studious leader). They did rely on backing tracks to flesh out the sound, a disappointment in terms of encouraging ghost-like additives to the otherwise very-live playing and limiting the structural real estate of the set, against jazz type.
At the show last Tuesday, Mancuso drew a large and generally awed crowd from different camps of musical taste and age sets. Electric guitar nerds, progressive rock folks, and certified jazz fans filled the house (including some, like myself, who pivoted to the Lobero on that night after the Granada’s Terence Blanchard/Ravi Coltrane concert was canceled on short notice, due to weather/travel snafus).
Of the various forms and subgenres of jazz landing at the Lobero over the years, jazz-rock fusion — especially of the loud ‘n’ fast guitar-driven sort, has been rarities. Most notably, fusion pioneer John McLaughlin bewitched the Lobero in 2007 with his dynamo group 4th Dimension.
For historical context, Mancuso’s playing can variously remind us of such fusion guitar legends as Allan Holdsworth, Steve Vai (an avowed Mancuso fan), and Al Di Meola, and he tends to pay respects to trailblazers from the fusion heyday. Along with original tunes taken from a forthcoming album, Route 96, and the 2023 album The Journey, he called out Holdsworth’s and Jaco Pastorius’s “Chicken” and Chick Corea’s classic “Spain,” retooled into a custom arrangement, with its famed unison melody sliced, diced, and repeated under a final drum solo.
For balladic relief from the intensity of most of the evening, Mancuso also paid homage to the late, great Jeff Beck with the luminous Stevie Wonder tune “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” as played by Beck on his Blow by Blow album. In his hands, Mancuso wielded tasteful chops relying on the glissando-phonic vibrato bar, also a Beck specialty.
From his own songbook, the most rock and rolling tune of the night came with the headbanger jazz-rock number “Black Centurion.” But the imprint of his fusion forebears kept slipping into the mix, as when he also paid tribute to another ‘70s fusion influence, Weather Report, with his original “The Great Wall.”
Almost on a level beyond the nature of the material played on this night, the real lingering impression was the sensation of watching his hands at work, and a certain “how’d he do that?” sense of wonder. Most importantly, though, this young firebrand has a deep musicality on his side. He’s been places and is clearly going places. Hopefully, Santa Barbara will be on his future map of travels.
