Steve Gunn’s homecoming solo performance at the Ardmore Music Hall: Impressive and complex guitar lines

Steve Gunn’s albums, such as this year’s excellent Other You, are deceptive.

They scan as gentle, loping singer-songwriter fare, anchored in Gunn’s mellow vocals and reverberating guitars and songs about quiet mornings and restorative walks. But, as Gunn’s solo performance Friday night at the Ardmore Music Hall revealed, his songs are built on impressive guitar lines and skillfully contained tensions.

Now based in Brooklyn, Gunn grew up in Lansdowne, went to Temple, and immersed himself in the work of exploratory folk guitarists such as John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Philly’s Jack Rose while also falling under the spell of the Sun Ra Arkestra and other avant-garde jazz experimentalists. He’s equally at home playing 10-minute free jazz improvisations, trading rock riffs with Kurt Vile (whose band the Violators he joined for a time), and covering esoteric folk tunes at the Newport Folk Festival, as he did this past summer.

His 60-minute set Friday, the penultimate date of a co-headlining tour with post-rock / jazz guitarist Jeff Parker, was a homecoming. He wished belated happy birthdays to his mother and sister who were in the comfortably distanced, well-masked and vaccinated audience, and he good-naturedly scoffed at a heckling shout for Ardmore mainstays the Hooters.

The show’s solo acoustic arrangements highlighted the depth, variety, and complexity of the guitar lines underpinning his pastoral melodies. “New Familiar,” from 2019′s The Unseen In Between, moved from ripples of gentle feedback to a tricky, circular lead that spun on a swift triplet. On the pretty “Morning River,” one of a handful of songs from Other You, his sustained chords sounded like keyboards; on the meditative “Fulton,” gently distorted notes punctuated the shimmering surface. Gunn also paid tribute to his friend Michael Chapman, the British folk artist who died in September at age 80, in a spellbinding, straightforward cover of “Among the Trees.”

Although the set was subdued there were glimpses of his experimental side, especially in “Way Out Weather,” the title track of his 2014 album, and when he joined Jeff Parker at the end of Parker’s 55-minute set.

Parker, now based in Los Angeles, has been a central part of Chicago’s experimental music scene since the mid-90s as a member of the post-rock band Tortoise, the electronics-based Isotope 217, and the avant-jazz Chicago Underground Trio. He’s played funk with Meshell Ndegeocello, indie-folk with Smog, and jazz with Philly’s Joey DeFrancesco, and he has an entrancing new solo electric guitar album, Forfolks.

Parker said he had planned to play solo and feature Forfolks tracks, but instead he brought in drummer Chad Taylor, his bandmate in the Chicago Underground Trio and Quartet, who is now based in Philly. Their adventurous set sometimes featured Taylor in the lead, with skittering patterns propelling Parker’s spiky lines.

A Parker-Taylor-Gunn trio song was tantalizing: Taylor established a funk groove, Parker played staccato, asymmetrical lines, and Gunn took the lead with glimmering acoustic guitar chords that became both increasingly bright and dense. The collaboration was a treat, and hopefully one that will continue.