Chadbourne / Blechdom

The Chaddom Blechbourne Experience

Label: Victo Country: Canada

"Chadbourne, who first emerged as part of New York's Downtown Music scene, has not attained the degree of success that early collaborator John Zorn has. Still, he's shaped a career that's perhaps even more stylistically unbound than Zorn's, with a personal discography that's well in excess of one hundred recordings, ranging from the warped rockabilly of the group Shockabilly to the more jazz-centric (but no less eccentric) The Hills Have Jazz (Boxholder, 2005).

Kevin Blechdom is the onstage persona of Kristin Erickson, who was one-half of Blectum from Blechdom and became known for wild electronic experimentation and imaginative interpretation.

All the more reason that the pairing of Chadbourne and BlechdomÑresulting from a one-week residence in France where it was dubbed The Chaddom-Blechbourne Experience, and a couple of performances thereafter (this being their North American debut)Ñshould be so odd; or, perhaps, not odd at all. Chadbourne has developed a reputation as outspoken political songsmith and virtuoso instrumentalist; here he restricted himself to banjo, while the equally trenchant Blechdom split her time between piano and an electric banjo. The set had a exhilarating feeling of spontaneity, as Chadbourne largely called the tunes, but the two managed to find weird and wonderful ways to morph from one song to the next and, in one case, combine a number of them together in ways nobody could have imagined.

Few could even conceive reinventing Pink Floyd's psychedelic Syd Barret-era "Astronomy Domine" for two banjos, but in Chadbourne and Blechdom's hands it worked. As did a number of archival roots tunes and the biting satire of ther original materialÑpolitical and otherwise. Equally there was a slapstick element of absurdity when Chadbourne began taking down the balloons floating above the lush plant life onstage and inhaling the helium to lend his vocal range a significant boost in the high end. Of course it would have been even better had the balloons not kept breaking on him before he could inhale the gas.

Beneath the comedy, however, were some simple facts. First, Chadbourne proved a remarkably talented banjoist who adopted new tunings on the fly throughout the set (not to mention handling broken strings with ease), and played with a loose inventiveness that, despite first appearances, made the set fit perfectly within the concept of Musique Actuelle. Blechdom took a more supportive role on banjo, but turned out to be a surprisingly good pianist. And both had strong voices capable of clean power and gritty raunch. All of which made for a rollicking good time well-received by the capacity crowd."-John Kelman, All About Jazz

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