Guitarists show skill, wide range> Matthews, Reynolds prove two can do the job

Hanging with Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds isn’t too different from hanging with any two guys who get together to play guitar. They jam. They tell jokes. They have a good time cutting themselves up and getting all sorts of silly.

And, then again, hanging with Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, as a full house of mostly college students did for last night’s concert at the Maine Center for the Arts, is like hanging with no other two guitar players. Matthews plays straight-man rhythm guitar and sings in his characteristically wide-ranging voice while Reynolds works away with virtuoso facility at jazz, progressive-rock, classical and ethnic guitar styles. Few music groups could trim themselves back to a two-man show these days and come up with a successful concert. But these guys did just that last night.

Playing songs primarily from the Dave Matthews Band recordings “Remember Two Things,” “Under the Table and Dreaming,” and “Crash,” the guitarists hit it hard for nearly three hours of the distinctively laid-back music.

“Proudest Monkey,” “Ants Marching,” “What Would You Say,” “Angel From Montgomery,” “Crash Into Me,” “Minarets,” and “Too Much” were favorites among the mellow Orono crowd that greeted Matthews and Reynolds with a standing ovation and then sat through most of the concert. It may have been that the audience was asleep, joked Matthews, but “you’re the kindest audience we’ve had so far.”

Although Matthews was, for sure, the drawing card for this concert, it was Reynolds who is the relentlessly gifted guitarist. In an instrumental solo, the overtly deft Reynolds went from tender to turbulent to something very close to performance art with his musical pyrotechnics. Whether he was banging out percussion, slipping around with a slide, yanking away at a vibrato or whipping out the lead, Reynolds was the star of this talent show. In fact, it wouldn’t have hurt anything at all if his guitar had actually been turned up a little louder.

Of course, Dave Matthews is beloved among his fans, especially college- and high-school age female fans, who love his troubadour-style of delivery and his sensitively poetic lyrics. It helps, too, that his vocal abilities are so naturally free-floating that he manages a spontaneity and soul in songs he has sung hundreds of times. More than most singer-songwriters of the ’90s, Matthews makes you want to be sung to, and that’s nothing short of rare in this decade.

For others, it may seem that Matthews’ compositions melt into one another in a style that eventually turns flat. But there’s no denying that hanging with this twosome has an addictive quality to it. A couple of the tunes were so thick with innovative sounds they made you forget that the whole band with its backup violin, sax, flute, drums, harmonica and bass wasn’t there.