be effective during quick eight-bar bursts neatly tucked away into "great" songs by a Chuck Berry, Graham Parker or a Rod Stewart. They love Pete Townshend not just because he's smart, but because he plays a lot of chords. In fact, many hard-liners still refuse to accept the guitar outside of its traditional role as a rhythm-section instrument.

Admittedly, Jeff Beck has been making major inroads with LP reviewers in the last two years, but he has two things going for him right from the outset: the Yardbirds-Jeff Beck Group nostalgia wedge, plus the fact he's been playing strong material (Lennon-McCartney's "She's a Woman," Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"). Roy Buchanan, whose early recordings exerted an acknowledged influence on Beck's style, has seemingly been "reinspired" by the young British master and is now also entering into the no man's land of instrumental fusion music.

Loading Zone, Buchanan's second solo album for Atlantic, is produced by Stanley Clarke, a built-in guarantee for jazz-rock legitimacy. More importantly, Clarke's rep as the killer bass player of the decade has had a positive, prodding effect on Buchanan's playing. He shifts into overdrive on the first track, a fiery and propulsive Clarke composition entitled "The Heat of the Battle," and never looks back for the whole album. He has always been the master of the Fender Telecaster squeal, but on some of these tracks his frenzied excursions into overtones, harmonics and tight clusters of notes played largely in the upper register of the instrument move beyond traditional lead-guitar histrionics. One gets an acute physical sense of Buchanan literally shredding his way through the blues-rock clichés to get to a higher, abstract plane. Sometimes he tries too hard—even the majestic exchange with Steve Cropper on the supersonic remake of "Green Onions" threatens to run on too long. But, like Beck, he is trying to take lead guitar into another dimension and his sparkling work on tunes like "Judy," "Hidden" and the tongue-in-cheek "Adventures of Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby" (featuring Clarke on "country-sprung" bass) augurs well for his continuing development.

Simply put: Al Di Meola is a young man with a lot of chops. He once told me that, during his Berklee days, he used to lock himself up in a closet and practice for ten or 12 hours a day. Whether or not this obsessive zeal has p