Andrew York is a pretty amazing guy—one of the best guitar players around in a pretty wide variety of idioms, extremely smart and cultured, a pretty avid painter (although I can’t say I love his paintings), and a programmer specializing in advanced encryption algorithms. He really transformed the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet (LAGQ) into a major musical force, and is a rare player who is a real virtuoso, but who often chooses to play—and compose—extremely simple music. That’s the case here, with three “discernments” from Dénouement, one of several albums of all-original material recorded during the Windham Hill heyday of New Age guitar. All three of these pieces are simple enough for even a very poor reader like me to sight read, but they all have their own charm. They don’t in any way form a trio or a triptych (there are eight “discernments” originally), but they were all new to me, and all by Andrew York, so they are a new York trilogy—followed by a fourth.

“Snowflight” is a somewhat melancholy and introspective all-arpeggio piece with a fairly driven rhythm. Like all of the “discernments” from Dénouement, it has the character of an étude, and I suspect that York wrote these pieces to give his students technical exercises that were also real music.

“Royal Plum Pudding” features a simple AABA structure and the sound of a Renaissance fanfare for a procession. A royal plum pudding is a real variation on a plum pudding recipe, by the way, but I can’t help but think that this tune is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek parody of this kind of stately processional music at the same time. Another drop-D piece.

“Sherry’s Waltz” is an even simpler ABABA—I tried to give the concluding A section a bit of a twist to help differentiate it.

“Squares Suspended” is a gorgeous piece from York’s latest solo album, and apart from some fast-shifting chord shapes in the final section, not terribly challenging to play (I could play it after a fashion in less than an hour, and reasonably well after two). I loved the piece, but hated the New Agey, impressionistic title—until it occurred to me that, with his math and music background, perhaps York meant something a little more numerological with his title. The piece is, after all, filled with suspended (hanging over, continuing) fourths and firsts—literal mathematical squares, in musical suspension.