eugene chadbourne reckless records may 2009

Also during these years, Zorn and Chadbourne, along with cellist Tom Cora, made notorious For the Record …īorn on January 4, 1954, in Mount Vernon, NY raised in Boulder, CO. Among the albums Chadbourne issued of his work are the now hard-to-find School and 2000 Statues: The English Channel. Around the same time, the guitarist met two of his most significant collaborators, visionary saxophonist John Zorn and West Coast-based guitarist Henry Kaiser, who both shared Chadboume ’s inclinations to uncover the possibilities of purely improvisational music. In 1977, he played on Frank Lowe ’s Lowe & Behold alongside Billy Bang. That same year, he released his debut solo album, Solo Acoustic Guitar.Īfter recording his debut, Chadbourne delved further into more experimental music, building connections in New York ’s “loft scene ” of avant-garde artists throughout the 1970s. Here he focused on his music in earnest, all the while making contact with other downtown performers. In 1976, President Jimmy Carter declared amnesty for conscientious objectors to the war, and Chadbourne returned to the United States and settled in New York City. Chadbourne further delayed his decision to take up music full time, and also derailed his journalistic pursuits, by exiling himself to Canada in order to avoid the Vietnam War draft.

Some of his favorites included Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Pharoah Sanders, and Omette Coleman, as well as England ’s free improviser, Derek Bailey.ĭespite his love for music, Chadbourne first chose to study journalism as a profession, a decision that many speculate was prompted by Ochs ’s radical songs. Before long, however, Chadbourne found himself hooked on the whole catalog of the 1960s black jazz revolution. First came exposure to John Coltrane and Roland Kirk, whose music puzzled him initially. Jazz, too, served as an important formative discovery. Thus, he traded in his electric guitar for a Harmony six-string acoustic and learned to play bottleneck blues. However, Chadbourne soon grew tired of the conventions of rock and pop. Hendrix, in particular, became an important influence, prompting him to begin experimenting with distortion pedals and fuzzboxes, as did protest singer Phil Ochs, an early rival to Dylan. In high school, Chadbourne played covers of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix with various bands. Raised by his mother, a refugee of the Nazi death camps, Chadbourne took up the guitar at age 11 after watching the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show. Even as an adult, he made his home base in the rural community of Greensboro, North Carolina, where he lives with his family. With no set lists, anything is liable to happen at a Eugene Chadbourne gig.Ĭhadbourne, born on January 4, 1954, in Mount Vernon, New York, grew up in relative cultural isolation in Boulder, Colorado. A man of self-reliance, Chadbourne regularly performs in odd places, such as record and book stores, as well as in smaller clubs and fringe music festivals. In the 1990s, he found a wider audience surprisingly more receptive to his music than in the past, and enjoyed growing success.

Nonetheless, the frizzy-haired Chadbourne has remained one of the underground community ’s most famous and well-regarded eccentrics since the mid-1970s. “He is many things at once: a hillbilly improviser, a self-made raconteur, a pop gemologist and a new music eclectic who mixes up jazz, folk, noise and neovaudeville, ” noted Woodard. ”īecause of his penchant for combining various forms, as well as inventing his own sound devices, critics find it difficult to place Chadbourne and his growing discography neatly within the scheme of American music. “I really missed that when we started weeding that out of rock. “One of the things I liked about the music in the ’60s was how weird it got and how many sound effects were on the records, ” Chadbourne told Los Angeles Times writer Josef Woodard. Likewise, his trademark electric rake -a lawn rake fitted with a pickup -further demonstrates the musician ’s knack for discovering new sound possibilities. In addition to working within these Western formats, he feels just as comfortable exploring the sounds of various other cultures, often incorporating Asian and Middle Eastern styles and instrumentation into his creations. An innovative guitarist and a true maverick of modern American music, Eugene Chadbourne has spent his career both undermining and energizing the contemporary rock scene, ignoring all of the barriers traditionally placed between folk, blues, country, jazz, and rock.

Eugene chadbourne reckless records may 2009