Ned Evett – with Special Guests

— Pioneering fretless guitarist Ned Evett is returning to Upstate New York for the first time in 20 years, performing in Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester Aug. 6-8.

His name might be familiar to longtime guitar fans in the region, with Evett winning the 2003 North American Rock Guitar Competition at the University of Buffalo, which the internationally televised PBS documentary film “Driven to Play” produced by WNED-TV chronicled in 2004. That summer, Evett and French fretless guitarist Franck Vigroux also routed through upstate New York on their U.S. tour in support of the experimental fretless guitar masterpiece, “Evett/Vigroux.”

Considered even back then among the world’s foremost fretless guitarists, Evett has earned growing acclaim over the last two decades.

Described by Guitar Player magazine as “the world’s first fretless guitar rockstar” and dubbed “the king of the glass-necked guitar” by USA Today, Evett is the inventor of the glass-necked fretless guitar and the glass slide capo. Frets are the series of ridges fixed across the fingerboards of traditional guitars, and playing instruments that lack them requires extraordinary technical prowess, incredible muscle memory, and perfect pitch.