The music business has never quite known what to make of Gary Lucas. Go to a site for streaming or downloading songs, and you may find his music consigned to a vague category called “other.” Look him up in standard reference works, and he’s likely to be referred to as a “legendary left-field guitarist” whose work is “eclectic” or just plain “eccentric.”
But that’s what happens when you’ve performed with everyone from Captain Beefheart to Leonard Bernstein (on his “Mass”), and your tastes and itinerary take you as far afield as Poland, China, Spain, Israel, India and Cuba. You end up with a reputation for being all over the map, both literally and figuratively.
“I like and like doing all kinds of music, and that’s been a blessing and a curse, but I’ll accept that,” Mr. Lucas said in a recent interview, in advance of the release on Tuesday of “The Ordeal of Civility” (Knitting Factory), his new CD. “There’s probably not a genre you can think of that I couldn’t find an example of something worthy in it. I look at myself as a global citizen: it’s a big old world out there, and I don’t want to be restricted.”
For much of his career, Mr. Lucas, 58, has also operated out of the spotlight, initially as a guitarist in the resolutely avant-garde Beefheart ensemble and later, in the early 1990s, as the writer of a dozen songs with Jeff Buckley, the best known of which are “Grace” and “Mojo Pin.” But among music professionals, he has long been held in high esteem for his dexterous and inventive playing.
“Gary Lucas may well be the greatest living electric guitarist,” said the psychologist Daniel Levitin, author of the book “This Is Your Brain on Music” and a former recording engineer for the Grateful Dead and Santana. “He obviously has great technical facility, but beyond that I find a great combination of lyricism and exoticism in his playing. The lines he plays are not along the beaten path, and they show the influence of all kinds of musics and musical traditions. He has a palette of tones that is very wide and pleasing to the ear, at least to my ear.”
Though passionate about the guitar since his childhood, Mr. Lucas did not become a full-time performer until he was nearly 40. For more than a dozen years, he worked at Columbia Records, mostly as an ad copywriter, responsible for the famous description of the Clash as “the only band that matters.” He also managed Captain Beefheart for part of that time, before joining that band on guitar and gaining renown among guitar fanatics for his rendering of a notoriously difficult instrumental piece.
The producer Hal Willner, who has worked with Lou Reed, Bill Frisell, William S. Burroughs and Sun Ra, has known Mr. Lucas since those Columbia days in the 1970s and said he had initially thought of him as a business-type-cum-fan. When he finally saw Mr. Lucas play, it came as both a shock and a revelation.
“That first time was definitely a ‘wow’ moment,” recalled Mr. Willner, who described Mr. Lucas as a creator of “futuristic roots music” and eventually brought him together with Mr. Buckley. “It was like, ‘Oh, he took off the Clark Kent outfit there.’ He’s just someone who is incredibly rounded as a player, who can quote from Stravinsky and Howlin’ Wolf and put them together to make his own sound.”
In addition to performing on electric, with an assortment of pedals, boxes, slides and other effects to distort his sound and create delays and loops, Mr. Lucas also plays acoustic guitar extensively, his favorite being a steel-body National of the sort favored by bluesmen. But in both formats, he strives for a sound that might be called music from the Delta — both the Mississippi and the Ganges.
“I love drones and the deep, hypnotic grooves they can produce,” he said. “It’s the mother source of music, and most of the music I really like, whether Miles or Coltrane’s modal stuff, Indian or Jewish or African music, springs from that. Even the pedal point of a Bach cantata has a drone going through it. It’s a holy centrifugal force, a reference that can ground a piece so that you can ascend and lift and improvise in a celestial way.”
One recent recording, “Rishte,” is a collaboration in that style with the Muslim Anglo-Pakistani ghazal singer Najma Akhtar. Another project, “The Edge of Heaven,” is a bluesified rendering of mid-20th-century Chinese pop songs; Mr. Lucas has also made several records, among them “Busy Being Born” and “Street of Lost Brothers,” which draw on Jewish themes and traditional styles like klezmer.
“I’m a Jewish person who is very proud of his heritage and roots,” said Mr. Lucas, who was born and raised in Syracuse, studied English at Yale and now lives in the West Village. “I’m fascinated, for example, by the Kabbalah — not Madonna’s version of it, but just the arcane, mystical side of Judaism.”
For the last 20 years, perhaps the only constant in Mr. Lucas’s musical life has been the rock group he leads, Gods and Monsters, which includes members of Television and the Modern Lovers and is scheduled to perform at Joe’s Pub on May 27. “The Ordeal of Civility” is meant to be radio-friendly and, without forcing Mr. Lucas to relinquish his guitar frolics, finds him singing more and incorporating horns into his sound to a greater extent than in the past.
“Gary’s music has a particular kind of defined strangeness that works well because it is so completely open-ended,” said Jerry Harrison, the former Talking Heads keyboard and guitar player who produced the recording and has occasionally toured with Gods and Monsters. “He’ll use unusual tunings and chords that you don’t normally see in rock music, often in a sort of modal or dissonant nature that challenge the musician to play along with them.”
The new CD’s title comes from a 1974 book of the same name whose subtitle refers to “the Jewish struggle with modernity.” To Mr. Lucas’s friends, that’s just one more indication that the diversity of his interests goes way beyond music to encompass a variety of intellectual pursuits that also emerge in his songwriting.
“His lyrics are kind of twisted, but incredibly smart, imaginative and sophisticated,” Mr. Willner said. “It’s not a pretentious thing with him. He’s just scary literate about all kinds of film and poetry and ideas, as I’m reminded any time I go to his apartment and see the books he has been reading.” Mr. Lucas’s most recent project, still gestating, is a collaboration with Cuban musicians. He has been recording in Havana with members of Los Van Van and two daughters of Pablo Milanés’s, experimenting with reworking some of his older compositions to see what they sound like when they are “Cubanized.” Included are some of the songs he wrote with Mr. Buckley, who sang for a while with Gods and Monsters before going off on his own.
“Because Gary is constantly moving in any direction and doesn’t fall into any of the specific genre categories, he’s always evolving,” said Lenny Kaye, who has been Patti Smith’s guitarist for 40 years and has also played occasionally with Mr. Lucas. “Gary is a friend to improvisation. Once you get him in a wild card situation where anything goes, anything does go.”
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