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I'm finding it hard to reconcile Bill Frisell's recent "Good Dog, Happy Man" release with his astonishing, incendiary, touch-sensitive, endlessly inventive and completely distinctive playing of the mid-80s to mid-90s. Whilst others rate it highly, I find it just too content with itself - what Bill should've done next was to keep pushing the guitar on: both the shrieking, dive-bombing, noise-derived assaults and the feathery, shimmering, delicate craftsmanship he is perfectly capable of, across the numerous genres he's effortlessly familiar with. Yet thankfully, the baton has been picked up by two current guitar-led trios: Brandon Ross's Harriet Tubman and this Marc Ducret trio. The guitar trio is surely one of the great inventions of the late 20thC, and here there are echoes of Hendrix, Cream, Tony Williams Lifetime, Gateway, but most closely, Frisell's trios with Joe Lovano and Paul Motian, and Joey Baron and Kermit Driscoll; and the great Universal Congress Of (I know UCO were a quartet, but imagine the Joe Baiza solos and we're pretty close. Whatever happened to Baiza? Awesome player). Marc Ducret, a Frenchman though musically close to the Downtown NYC scene, had previously played in Tim Berne's and Bobby Previte's bands, and released two solo records in which his astonishing virtuosity had been smartly allied to playing of real character and panache. Sure he owes debts to Frisell - the overdriven lead, the volume-pedal swells, the unravelling chords - but he's also developed a unique melodic sense and a very particular touch. The 15-minute opener, "Dialectes", is unbelievably intense, featuring Ducret looping violent, upwards-bending bursts, then reacting against these loops whilst his cohorts thresh around him, whereas second track "Lust" features disjointed, shuddering riffing not unlike Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir". Quite an introduction. Indeed, Ducret's a showier player than Frisell or Ross - there's some incredibly fluid playing here, particularly on "Unes Cène Surtout Se Renouv Elait Cha Que Jour" which commences with effortless, scurrying lines, before developing a carefully drawn out guitar/bass theme against a backdrop of bowed strings. Yet we're talking a real musician here - not some self-indulgent music school graduate, but a guitarist of consummate skill who's got the taste to go with it. There is some memorable music here, and Ducret displays real subtlety alongside his bold abstract expressionist splashes. His twisting, writhing, hammered trills on "Lust" and "Un Certain Malaise" are beautiful - perhaps the most European sounds on the album, if that makes any sense. Bruno Chevillon's double-bass is impressive too, his high-register plucked intro to "Ta Rot" is reminiscent of Gary Peacock - indeed Chevillon features on several Louis Sclavis albums for ECM. Eric Echampard is a suitably muscular drummer too, coaxing Ducret's pyrotechnics along via an insistent barrage of nudges and jabs. This trio sound like they'd be worth catching live if possible. This is also another exquisitely packaged Screwgun release where, along with his work for Winter and Winter, designer Stephen Byram is quite simply producing the finest music artwork around at the moment. Fans of challenging, contemporary electric jazz should definitely pick this up - that includes you, Bill!