John Scofield gives good guitar-face.

“The only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist.” That’s the self-deprecating header on Wilco six-stringer Nels Cline’s MySpace page. Cline had nothing to with last night’s trio of guitar trios assembled under the big white tent at Nathan Phillips Square, but his motto might have been useful counsel for whoever planned the evening.

Cramming the John Scofield, John Abercrombie and Mike Stern trios all into one bill creates an ambitious bit of listening for even the most overindulgent aural appetite. Of course each bandleader, not to mention their respective trios, is more or less legendary in their own right. And the sold-out crowd witnessed what was probably one of the finest nights of this year’s festival. But after three-plus hours of jazz guitar, the wheedly-deedly overkill begins to grind away on one’s appreciative receptors. You can have too much of a good thing.

Despite drummer Adam Nussbaum breaking a floor tom during their first tune, John Abercrombie’s trio opened the evening with a deceptively restrained sound drawing largely on the guitarist’s Third Quartet album. Abercrombie’s expansive phrases came in flurried bursts, brilliantly complimenting the modern grooves of “Wishing Bell” and the ethereal ECM-worthy “Spring Song.” The highlight came, unfortunately, at the set’s end where Abercrombie’s own composition “Vingt-Six” morphed into a frantic run-through of Ornette Coleman’s “Round Trip.”

With Abercrombie’s set ending on such a high note, it seemed only appropriate for former Blood Sweat and Tears guitarist Mike Stern’s trio to grab that proverbial baton and run it straight though to the edges of exhaustion. It might have been his Spinal Tap haircut, but every explosion of notes, every piercing bend and every grinning nod to the crowd seemed infused with some sort of weird rock-star aura that had me convinced that some Van Halen-style high-kicks were just around the next pile of 32nd notes. For all my reservations about Stern’s somewhat tasteless exuberance — read: wanky approach to jazz guitar — there’s no disputing the fact that the man can play. Besides, his band was a veritable chop shop of fills, grooves and solos that rendered their offending-the-closeted-jazz-purist-inside-of-me blend of jazz, rock and blues a seriously crowd-pleasing affair.

After such fretboard frenzy, even John Scofield’s admission of “How do you play after those guys?” seemed somewhat of an understatement. In response, Scofield led his heavily stacked trio (bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Bill Stewart are the stuff of legend I mentioned earlier) through a seemingly short but wholly gratifying set. Opening with The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun,” they infused the up-tempo take from their latest disc, This Meets That, with a visceral intensity. All three players coiled their ideas around each other with telepathic ease. Stewart alone is that rare talent that blends endlessly inventive chops with a refusal to pander to the acoustics of festival PAs — in other words, he doesn’t play jazz like a rock drummer. For the second time in the evening, the set closer was clearly the most captivating moment, as Sco and co. went outside and got all noisy on a dark and moody composition called “The Low Road.”

With so much talent in the tent, there was no clear crowd favourite among the triple trios — the people around me breathed reverence for Abercrombie’s tasteful craftsmanship equal to their whooping delight in Stern’s crowd-milking wails. But the encore tag-team of Scofield and Stern, along with Swallow and Nussbaum, sent at least one ancient tie-dyed hippie into a whirling dervish dance of celebration that led him to the front of the stage as if he was channelling the entire crowd’s collective appreciation. For some folks, there is no such thing as too much of a good thing.

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