- Eugene Chadbourne - Solo Bowery Poetry Club January 19, 2003
- With Julian Kytasty and Evan Rapport - Knitting Factory Old Office, January 21, 2003 9 pm and 11 pm
- With Joe Morris, Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemmingway - Tonic, January 24, 2003
In a sense, Eugene Chadbourne sells himself short. His homemade cds and packaging, his sometimes odd choices in songs to cover, his penchant for onstage impersonations of Dorothy Helms - in all, the fact that he's not a serious artist might lead some to miss the fact that he's a serious musician. Not that his fans would have it any other way. His satiric political bite is as much a part of his repertoire as his love for Tammy Wynette and Ernest Tubb. But over three nights in New York, Chadbourne showed that he is dexterous in different situations.
An early evening gig at the Bowery Poetry Club was not without complications, but as a result became the rare solo banjo set that this humble fanboy had hoped for anyway. Technical problems prevented the doctor from plugging in his new cherry-red Bo Diddley guitar, clearly disappointing him and no doubt some audience members seduced by the shiny rectangular ax. But Chadbourne has a way with banjo. He's a fine guitarist, but compared to his playing on the five-string, his guitar work tends toward riff and reference. The banjo, however, he has made uniquely his own. He can pick a la Appalachia when called upon, but he's translated the speed of the banjo into an extended technique of muted notes and repeated chordal structures very unlike the instrument's history. That technique is also evidenced on his recent and excellent disc Click Clack, his third solo banjo disc and the source of much of the Bowery Poetry set. The Don van Vliet-penned title and his great versions of Cousin Emmy's "Graveyard" as well as two traditional numbers, "The Johnson Boys" and "Rabbit in the Peapatch" (also a traditional song) were all included on the evening's set list.
Beyond those picks, Chadbourne selected from his own well of protest songs, an area where his songwriting really excels. "Checkers of Blood" is a chilling song about two people playing checkers, each squeezing their game pieces so hard that blood is spilling across the board. "People Will Vote for Whoever Gives them Food" as an indictment of the workings of democracy on impoverished people. And for good measure, Zappa's "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" was thrown in.
If it makes any sense to refer to an "experimental" side to Eugene Chadbourne, two sets at the Knitting Factory Old Office were just that. Chadbourne's willingness to throw himself into the unknown can make great things happen, and with bandurist Julian Kytasty and Evan Rapport on saxophone, he created just that. A sort of a bad-dream piano trio, with Kytasty's bandura (a Romanian stringed instrument a bit like a laptop harp) sounding like strummed piano strings, Rapport playing flutters and drones on soprano and alto (sometimes simultaneously) and Chadbourne's percussive banjo playing doing something akin to keeping time. A healthy amount of bar chatter from the back of the room also added to the fever-dream ambiance. Kytasty plays quite beautifully carrying bass lines and plucking rich, resonant melodies, but then moving outside, playing percussively and dragging objects across the strings. He looks every bit the role of a Romanian troubadour, making him quite the contrast to Rapport. Rapport played a little nose flute, and when he took out a recorder or harmonica put those up his nose as well (if he was watching, Adolphe Sax was surely glad he made his mouthpiece as big as he did). The young Rapport no doubt has some John Zorn and Rahsaan Roland Kirk in his collection (he knew his chops when the group launched into Kirk's "Volunteered Slavery"), and his loose wire is reminiscent of Chad's own young and innocent days. Together, the group pulled off fast, unrehearsed changes, from beauty to blare.
The newest thing in Chadbourne's bag of tricks is pitching himself as an ensemble player. Eugene's projects have almost always been very much his own, so 2000's Pain Pen (Avant) came as a surprise: Chadbourne sitting in, not leading, as one-fourth of a quartet with Mark Dresser, Joe Morris and Susie Ibarra. The Tonic set brought most of that band together again, replacing Ibarra with Gerry Hemmingway, to mixed results. The presence of banjo seemed, surprisingly, to subdue Morris, whose language is made primarily of fast, single-note runs. That or Morris (who has been playing banjo himself recently) might have been seduced by his own shiny new Epiphone hollowbody. Either way, he played the role of accompanist for much of the set, putting subtle chordings and percussive support under the dualing lines of Chadbourne and Dresser. Hemmingway was unusually heavy, making this a very different affair from the Avant album. He hit strong, steady rhythms, sometimes at a driving speed. A straight improv set, not falling back on songs, is probably a riskier affair than the doctor took on the previous nights, and here was not without rewards. Morris delivered two excellent solos and Chadbourne's Bo Diddley alternately sounded sweet and pushed nasty overdrive. Dresser is a rock - he's the sort of player, like Joey Baron and Ikue Mori - who can find a method in other people's madness, laying one or two lines underneath the mix that makes sense of everything.
Chadbourne ended the set with his first foray into bluegrass banjo for the evening, shooting smiling looks at Morris as if wondering where the guitarist would go. Morris and the rhythm section responded not in mock country mode but pulling the theme back into New York improv for th e longest, and best, piece of the night.
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