I sure hope Fernando Perdomo took it as the compliment I intended when I described him as “a musical hummingbird.”

The in-demand session player—a true multi-instrumentalist whose specialty is pretty much any style of guitar playing under the sun that your project might call for—has flitted from project to project for the two decades since I first encountered him as a key member of the Zappa-adjacent psych-rock collective Transcendence. Last time he caught my attention he was slamming home hard rock instrumentals with Carmine Appice, but he’s just as likely to be found playing jazz bass with Dave Koz or every instrument he can get his hands on with singer-songwriter Rebecca Pidgeon.

Perdomo is also a progressive rock fan, a detail that definitely comes to mind on first listen to his latest solo outing Self. It’s a simple title reflecting a simple truth: Perdomo made every single sound on this record, playing guitar, bass, drums and keys, and singing lead and background vocals. It also reflects the album’s central ethos; as Perdomo says in the engaging liner notes, “As a sideman I get to cosplay a lot… Self is not just an album…. It is the most complete statement I have ever made as a recording artist.”

Perdomo kicks things off with the big, dreamy, sunny-yet-melancholy “Searching For Myself,” whose expansive feel, richly layered guitars and airy vocals wouldn’t have been out of place on a latter-day Pink Floyd album. Fast-picked acoustic accompanied by shaker opens “Everything Leads To Now,” an incisive lesson about being present that cements the first impression that Perdomo’s reputation as ace guitarist and session man undersells the breadth of his talents. His voice might not be that of a classic frontman, but it’s solid and appealing and augmented by the clear enthusiasm he feels for singing his own songs. As the song develops, he adds little synth flourishes that enhance the flavor of progressive pop.

The genre-bending “Optimist Prime” features squalling synths over a pulsing, increasingly muscular backbeat, with Perdomo’s chilled-out vocals riding on top as he chants the mantra of this album: “Everything is going my way / I’m going to live my life my way.” There’s a hint of ELO in this one’s bones. Then “Absolute Silence” delivers a dreamy lullaby that’s reassuring even as its almost-eerie undercurrents suggest the potential that it could slip into nightmare. “Who I Really Am” feels like the disorienting nexus between Alan Parsons Project and the aforementioned Zappa, melodic blue-eyed funk with a hint of psychedelic outrageousness as Perdomo runs wild with multi-tracked vocals and musical mix-and-match moments. The final standard-length (sub-4:15) track is the pretty instrumental “All Of Us Under The Same Moon,” with Perdomo playing two different, intertwining, complementary acoustic guitar melody lines.

The album’s magnum opus is the Jon Anderson-adjacent “Self,” a 20-minute epic consisting of a series of warm-hearted affirmations over a constantly shapeshifting bed of music that defies description. It’s as much post-rock as prog; there are no suites or movements, just a steady evolution, a continuous flow of rhythm and melody and instrumental flourishes that morphs and morphs again. It’s music that feels intended to get you lost in it, as there are no signposts, no repeating hooks or dramatic shifts. For me, for those reasons, it wasn’t as captivating as it might have been, though it’s lovingly crafted and features some beautiful moments along the way. The lyrics consist of a series of chants of phrases that contain “self,” e.g. as “I have found myself” and “self-examination.” As Perdomo chants “talk to yourself” in the 17th minute, we get into some bold blues soloing as the synthesizers get weird, building toward a big crescendo-ing jam with some molten riffing. Once the guitar hero finally comes out to play, his background vocals sing the guitar solo along with it, a pretty cool touch. And onward “Self” goes, getting a little heavier and a little stranger until it finally exhausts its momentum around 19:30 and fades away into the ether.

As a declaration of identity, this album feels like it captures Perdomo to a T, which is to say that it’s rangy and fearless and unpredictable and manifests an outrageous amount of enthusiasm for the act of making music. It’s individualistic to an extreme, which means your mileage may vary considerably as a listener, but for this particular one, Self was an entertaining ride through the kaleidoscopic imagination of a genuine musical savant. This hummingbird can fly.

Rating: B+

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