Big Four Guitar Summit: Fred Fried, Jim Robitaille, Pat Ryan and Alan Clinger

Guitar Summit tunes up for Art Association

By Sue Harrison

August 31, 2006

Bart Weisman, who took over hosting the Provincetown Art Association and Museum Wednesday concert series this summer after illness sidelined longtime concert coordinator Dick Miller, thought he’d like to try a few new things. One of those new events is this coming Wednesday’s Guitar Summit, featuring four guitar players: Fred Fried, Pat Ryan, Alan Clinger and Jim Robitaille. Backing the guitarists are Weisman on drums and Laird Boles on bass.

Weisman explains that a guitar summit is a particular kind of musical performance that usually features three accomplished guitar players who work in different styles. He mentions guitarists like Charlie Byrd, Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel. For his guitar summit he invited four, figuring at least one would drop out, but to his surprise all four accepted. Then he thought, great, four is even better.

“It’s a chance to do something that hasn’t been done on the Cape and a chance to change it up a little with four players,” Weisman says. “We’ll start with all four guitarists playing together for two numbers. Then we will showcase each guitarist with two numbers and finish up with another two songs with all four.”

He says he played with all of them at once, except Clinger, at the recent Provincetown Jazz Festival, which he produces. Their styles vary, with Clinger being the more traditional guitarist. Fried plays an unusual seven-string guitar and Ryan leans towards an edgier fusion style. Robitaille, also a jazz player, is the winner of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Composers Competition.

Fried’s seven-string guitar originated with George Van Eps, with whom Fried studied. It features an additional bass string that is an A below E – the traditional sixth or top string on a guitar. That allows for increased depth in the bass lines and enables the guitar to be more easily played in a pianistic style that opens up chords and melody lines.

The guitarists have all played with a number of different bands and have an impressive list of CD credits to their names.

Weisman is already thinking ahead to next year. He wants to expand the Jazz Festival and add a master class to be taught at the Fine Arts Work Center, and he’s thinking of interesting musical programs like a swing Klezmer concert.

“It’s a chance to bring new people to the Cape who haven’t been here before,” he says. “You see all of the arts, the people painting – to me this is like painting. Each time there is a performance, it’s a new painting.”

In all, Weisman wants to bump up the options and the fun.

“We are taking the ear to the next level,” he says. “We want it to be on a level with what you would hear in Boston, New York or Washington, D.C., but you’re hearing it in Provincetown.”