Guitar solos are a curious thing. In fact any solo outing is. The idea invites a monologue approach and the result is a kind of soliloquy and all that implies about intimacy and vulnerability, especially in a live setting. It also provides an opportunity to stretch out, to explore the instrument, the tune and the sound.

In this Otomo Yoshihide solo concert recorded early in 2015 in Tokyo, the guitarist plays on a special instrument, a Gibson ES-175 that his late teacher Takayanagi Masayuki used. The guitar sound is straight to amp, no effects, and the only "processing" is the natural distortion of the quasi-feedback level of the amp setting (a tube-amp, from the sounds of it) as the instrument resonates, glows and produces vibrations all its own.

The solo situation lets the man stretch out, and stretch out the man does, in a 13-minute rendition of Charlie Haden's "Song for Che," a 15-minute take on Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and an equally long original called "The Blue Kite," followed by a six-minute piece by Kagawa Ryo and a miniature at 1:02, the guitarist's "2020 Tokyo." And as he stretches, the music intensifies and pulses, with a lot of fibre in the sound and a lot of inspired melodic invention.

Equally noteworthy is the obvious pleasure that the composer in Yoshihide gets from being able to play � in every sense of the word � with a glorious instrument with so much meaning for the player, as the accompanying notes by Yoshihide explain. The listener feels like he's listening in on a private moment, with all of its subtle inflections. But the man can also shred, and shred ferociously.

Nothing about this session is glib and throw-away. Every note counts and is felt and deliberate. Some fine guitar playing � among the best I've heard in a while, mainly due to the beauty of the sound.