Guitar

Foreign visitors though they were, Group Doueh fit right in with Philadelphia's Fourth of July weekend festivities Saturday. The North African ensemble's sold-out show at Johnny Brenda's offered familiar elements from America's birthday celebration. There was the family get-together: center stage was patriarch Bamaar "Doueh" Salmou on tinidit (a Mauritanian lute) and scintillating electric guitar. To his right, wife Halima Jakani wailed throaty leads - as on the mesmerizing "Cheyla ya Haiuune," off Group Doueh's first album, Guitar Music From the Western Sahara - or dropped back to sway in unison with two other female vocalists.

Mark Shark strolls up South Street yesterday with the guitar he redeemed from a pawn shop recently. Shark said he had to borrow money on the instrument four months ago. He's been playing about nine years.

These days, most popular "alternative" guitar-rock gets in your face with blasts of grungy distortion or walls of fluttering white noise. The Sundays and Luna2, however, have precise, formal sonic agendas. The Sundays - perhaps the most delicate and tame of the plethora of new British female-fronted guitar bands - rely on Harriet Wheeler's girlish vocals, and Dave Gavurin's Smiths-style ambient guitar jangle. And Luna2 is based on Dean Wareham's exacting guitar, which concocts a shimmering, tensile Velvet Underground sound that is somnambulant and driving at the same time.

Sharon Isbin is hardly passive when it comes to getting new concertos written for her somewhat overlooked instrument. She once buttonholed a composer in line at her New York City post office. "I said, 'Hey, would you like to write a guitar concerto?' He said, 'Call me back next year.' That went on for eight years. " Isbin even came up with a compositional scheme for the composer in question, John Corigliano - she suggested a tale of French troubadours - and eventually got her concerto.

Reputed as the Grateful Dead of punkdom, Television had a penchant for keeping songs going with splintery twists and numerous, elongated solos. Tom Verlaine, leader of that often-eulogized combo, used the same kind of moody experimentation Saturday in his one-man show at the Theater of Living Arts. Backed only by his acoustic guitar, Verlaine tinkered with dynamics, timing and the conventions of the instrument to put on a wonderful show for about 100 people. Verlaine, one of the finer musicians to emerge from the punk scene, gave lessons in originality during his hour-long performance.

Andres Segovia, the guitar virtuoso who died Tuesday at 94 in his Madrid apartment, was recognized as the man who restored the guitar to its place in classical music. Segovia's burning missionary zeal had raised the guitar from its tawdry associations with Spanish Gypsy caves to place it in concert halls around the world. In a career spanning more than 70 years, Segovia unswervingly devoted himself to proving the guitar equal to the violin, piano or cello as a solo instrument and to reviving old music and commissioning new works for the instrument.

The accordion is said to be slipping out of sight as a popular instrument. Since 1950, when 130,000 were sold, it has dropped to a recent one-year sale of 35,000. Guitars, meanwhile, are being sold by the millions. There was a time when, in my neighborhood alone, there must have been 35,000 accordions. The only guitar player was a hillbilly who always strummed sad songs because hard times had forced him to leave his neighborhood and live with people who used garlic. There were a lot of reasons why the accordion was popular among the working and drinking classes.

One of the nice things about auctions, particularly those held in the suburbs when the summer lull begins, is that they offer items you are unlikely to encounter at conventional retail outlets. Two sales this weekend will offer examples of such unconventional items, including folk art and tramp art, Navajo crafts, and a classic Les Paul electric guitar signed (and played) by Paul himself. The Les Paul guitar will be among the more than 700 lots offered by Briggs Auction at its special estate antique sale beginning at 5 p.m. today at the gallery, 1347 Naamans Creek Rd., Garnet Valley.

Harvey Lee "Hiamsiam" Nelson, who played guitar at area clubs and lounges for more than 30 years, died Sunday. He was 77 and lived in North Philadelphia. Nelson, who also was known as "Colonel Lee" or "Doc" or "The Old Man," picked up a guitar at age 16 and taught himself to play. He attended auto mechanic school, and for most of his life filled in between gigs fixing cars. In later years he gave up working on cars because the automakers started making it "complicated" under the hood.

Earnest American guitar-rock bands promoting strong musical values are due for a comeback. Today, we're offering some primo candidates. For those who adore the rootsy, understated, country-tinged rock popularized by the Band, the Byrds, Little Feat and Graham Parsons, get to your music emporium and pick up "Continental Drifters" (Monkey Hill/Ichiban, . ). At turns earthy and whimsical while always tuneful, the Drifters will get your body swaying to the romantic trials of "Mixed Messages" and the (aching waltz time)

Vieux Farka Toure is a second-generation guitar luminary who has made a career successfully merging Africa and the diaspora. When he appeared at the Annenberg Center's Prince Theatre for the first of two sets Friday night, he showed the world he is not blending the music of his native Mali with that of other places. With an array of songs that ranged from African chamber music to Maghreb-Andaluz romps to slashing, incisive blues to joyous, rocking dance tunes, the guitarist showed the world that it's all been in Africa since the beginning.

The blistering pop of guitar strings, a thundering ground beat, and an audience clapping in three different rhythms — this is a night with Mexican guitar heroes Rodrigo y Gabriela. Fans at the Tower Theater Saturday night watched as a two-headed monster — the genre-breaking acoustic duo of Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero — joined forces with new musical allies, six members of the Cuban ensemble C.U.B.A., a collaborator on the duo's most recent album, Area 52. With deft backing from the band, Rodrigo drilled out one mini-gun melody after another and Gabriela beat rapid rhythms on the wood and strings of her guitar, her hand shaking like a flame.

A half-dozen songs into their show at the TLA Monday night, just as the power-pop trio Nada Surf was building up steam, a call rose from the crowd for "Popular," the 16-year-old hit that established the band, and nearly killed it. "Nice to see someone who was at our first show at Upstairs at Nick's," quipped singer Matthew Caws. "Or the Khyber Pass, or the North Star, or Johnny Brenda's. " The roster of club gigs past was a reminder of the long road Nada Surf had traveled to arrive in front of what Caws called its largest-ever audience in Philadelphia.

The New Musician and the Science of Learning By Gary Marcus Penguin Press. 288 pp. $25.95 Reviewed by David Falcone What makes music work? And why would anyone put in the time and effort to create it? Perhaps there is something incredibly satisfying in the way a musician can take so many sounds and help them find their way to the middle, a comfortable synthesis, producing a full and complete but simple melody. In exploring these questions, Gary Marcus' Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning has achieved a melody of its own. Plenty is going on in this book, and yet as the story and all its parts unfold, they find the center, beautifully synthesized.

MUSIC JEWEL OF THE BAYOU That's what they call Leroy Thomas and his Zydeco Roadrunners, and that's no exaggeration. He brings blues, R&B, funk and more to his gumbo stew. Allons Danser sponsors these events, so bring your dancing shoes. TK Club, 500 E Hector St., Conshohocken, 7:30 tonight, $20, free lesson 7:30, www.allonsdanser.org .   CROWE ON THE WIRE Not everything Rich Robinson writes fits the blustery Black Crowes blues-rock sound and image he's crafted with brother Chris.

Hispanic culture is refreshing classical music in ways that weren't imaginable 20 years ago. But rather than accessing the provocative, eclectic, and sophisticated new generation of composers (Roberto Sierra, Osvaldo Golijov), Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos stayed with the old school in his second guest-conducting week with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Kimmel Center. Such tuneful, atmospheric music couldn't help feeling like a warm-weather vacation on a chilly Thursday in March - but one without lasting impact, if only because so much of the repertoire seeks merely to be charmingly rustic.

The nine musicians emerge from a cloud of fog, illuminated by an eerie red light. They rise in the air as one, taking their spots on keyboard, guitar, drums, and cymbals. From the engineering minds at the University of Pennsylvania, we bring you flying robots - able to hover in the air so precisely that they can play the James Bond theme. Duh-duh dah-daahhh, duh-duh DAH-DAAHHH ... These quadrotors - so named for their four whirling blades - have become an Internet sensation, with one video getting 5.5 million YouTube hits since late January.

Sharon Van Etten is an itinerant singer-songwriter. Originally from New Jersey, she went to college in Tennessee, where she was involved in a destructive relationship that she mines in many of her direct, unflinching songs. She now resides in Brooklyn. Van Etten's career roots, however, begin here in Philadelphia. She recorded her first two brilliantly discomforting albums, Because I Was in Love (2009) and Epic (2010), with producer Brian McTear in his Fishtown studio, and Philly is her second home.

LOOKING FOR another worthy role model, Philly musicians? Mike Brenner has reinvented himself . . . yet again. A rootsy, experimental instrumentalist/singer/composer, Brenner first grabbed our attention with the Americana acoustic folk and alt-country of the Low Road and John Train. More recently, Brenner opened eyes and ears with his dobro blues/hip-hop fusion as Slo-Mo featuring rapper Mic Wrecka, from whence sprang the hit "My Buzz Comes Back. " Now he's crossed overinto yet another dimension, the entrancing world of dreamy Indian ragas, playing a 22-string Indian lap guitar called the chaturangui as frontman for the Kolkata Slide Guitar Project.

Baltimore-based singer/songwriter Cass McCombs is renowned for his bleak, urbane lyrics and melancholy musicality. There's a cool sense of distance to some of his saddest, smartest songs. There's ambition beneath the laconic surface, though. McCombs is driven enough to have released two albums in 2011, Humor Risk and Wit's End ; energetic enough to write complicated, cosmopolitan, humorous songs that plumb valuable emotional depths; and calculating enough to plan a wildly entertaining tour with one-man-jug-band opening act Frank Fairfield.