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Chadbourne / Kaiser: The Guitar Lesson (Les Disques Victo)


 

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product information:

Personnel:



Eugene Chadbourne-guitar

Henry Kaiser-guitar


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UPC: 777405006424

Label: Les Disques Victo
Catalog ID: VICCD064
Squidco Product Code: 742

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 1999
Country: Canada
Packaging: Jewel Tray
Recorded in December 1997 and March 1998 in Oakland, California.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Eugene Chadbourne on the left, Henry Kaiser on the right, both playing acoustic guitars and trying to find a ground for their styles to meet. Well, they found it. The Guitar Lesson feels relaxed, intimate, like two old friends playing on the porch with a beer within hand reach. Of course, in this case the friends in question happen to be two of the best avant-garde guitarists. There are two short electric guitar duets, "Number Four" and "Number Twenty-Two Is," but they merely create pauses. The interesting music is in the acoustic duets, first and foremost in the opening improv "Rothko Lumberjack." In the middle of "One That All Plectrum Guitar Players Can Relate to the Ending Of," Kaiser suddenly stops playing; Chadbourne continues for a while but soon both start shaking their guitars around, letting their lost plectrums dance within the instrument. The highlight of this very generous album (78 minutes) is the last piece, "Letter to Derek." In the purest style of Derek Bailey'stalking pieces and musical letters, the two guitarists pay tribute to their mentor. For 20 minutes, they play while talking about how they first heard Bailey on record, then met him. At one point they even do a double impression of the free improv luminary. They also discuss a few records and throw stories around. The Guitar Lesson is better than some of Chadbourne's guitar-only albums, such as the 2000 CD Piramida Cu Povesti. Recommended."-Francois Couture


Artist Biographies

"A seemingly endless -- and endlessly eclectic -- series of releases made the innovative guitarist Eugene Chadbourne one of the underground community's most well-known and well-regarded eccentrics. Born January 4, 1954 in Mount Vernon, NY, Chadbourne was raised in Boulder, CO, by his mother, a refugee of the Nazi death camps. At the age of 11, the Beatles inspired him to learn guitar; later exposure to Jimi Hendrix prompted him to begin experimenting with distortion pedals and fuzzboxes. Ultimately, however, he became dissatisfied with the conventions of rock and pop, and traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one, on which he began to learn to play bottleneck blues.

Perhaps Chadbourne's most significant formative discovery was jazz; initially drawn to John Coltrane and Roland Kirk, he later became an acolyte of the avant excursions of Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton. Despite the huge influence music exerted over his life, however, Chadbourne first studied to become a journalist, but his career was derailed when he fled to Canada rather than fight in Vietnam; only President Jimmy Carter's declaration of amnesty for conscientious objectors allowed the vociferously left-wing Chadbourne to return to the U.S. in 1976, at which time he plunged headlong into the New York downtown music scene. After releasing his 1976 debut, Solo Acoustic Guitar, he began collaborating on purely improvisational music with the visionary saxophonist John Zorn and the acclaimed guitarist Henry Kaiser.

Quickly, Chadbourne carved out a singular style, comprised of equal parts protest music, free improvisation, and avant-garde jazz, topped off with his absurd, squeaky vocals. A complete list of Chadbourne's countless subsequent collaborations and genre workouts is far too lengthy and detailed to exhaustively document, although in the early '80s he garnered some of his first significant attention as the frontman of Shockabilly, a demented rockabilly revisionist outfit which also featured the well-known producer Kramer. Following the group's breakup, Chadbourne turned to his own idiosyncratic brand of country and folk, accurately dubbed LSD C&W on a 1987 release, the same year he joined the members of Camper Van Beethoven for a one-off covers project. In addition, he recorded with artists ranging from Fred Frith and Elliott Sharp to Evan Johns and Jimmy Carl Black, the original drummer in the Mothers of Invention; in between, he continued exploring unique styles inspired by music from the four corners of the globe, all the while issuing a seemingly innumerable string of records, most of them on his own Parachute label."

-All Music (http://www.allmusic.com/artist/eugene-chadbourne-mn0000172925/biography)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Henry Kaiser (born September 19, 1952) is an American guitarist and composer, known as an idiosyncratic soloist, a sideman, an ethnomusicologist, and a film score composer. Recording and performing prolifically in many styles of music, Kaiser is a fixture on the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. He is considered a member of the "second generation" of American free improvisers. He is married to Canadian artist Brandy Gale.

In 1977, Kaiser founded Metalanguage Records with Larry Ochs (Rova Saxophone Quartet) and Greg Goodman. In 1979 he recorded With Friends Like These with Fred Frith, a collaboration that lasted for over 20 years. In 1983 they recorded Who Needs Enemies, and in 1987 the compilation album With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends? They joined with fellow experimental musicians John French, and English folk-rocker Richard Thompson to form French Frith Kaiser Thompson for two eclectic albums, Live, Love, Larf & Loaf (1987) and Invisible Means (1990). In 1999 Frith and Kaiser released Friends and Enemies, a compilation of their two Metalanguage albums along with additional material from 1984 and 1999.

In 1991, Kaiser went to Madagascar with guitarist David Lindley. They recorded roots music with Malagasy musicians and discovered music that, he says, "changed us radically and permanently". Three volumes of this music were released by Shanachie under the title A World Out of Time. In 1994 he made a similar trip to Norway, again with Lindley, recording music that was released as Sweet Sunny North (2 volumes, 1994 and 1996).

Since 1998, Kaiser has been collaborating with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith in the "Yo Miles!" project, releasing a series of tributes to Miles Davis's 1970s electric music. This shifting aggregation has included musicians from the worlds of rock (guitarists Nels Cline, Mike Keneally and Chris Muir, drummer Steve Smith), jazz (saxophonists Greg Osby and John Tchicai), avant-garde (keyboardist John Medeski, guitarist Elliott Sharp), and Indian classical music (tabla player Zakir Hussain).

Kaiser has appeared on more than 250 albums and scored dozens of TV shows and films, including Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World (2007). He was given a Grammy Award for his work on the Beautiful Dreamer tribute to Stephen Foster.

In 2001, Kaiser spent two and a half months in Antarctica on a National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant. He has subsequently returned for nine more visits to work as a research diver. His underwater camera work was featured in two Herzog films, The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) and Encounters at the End of the World (2007), which he also produced, and for which he and Lindley composed the score. Kaiser served as music producer for Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005). He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work as a producer on Encounters at the End of the World."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kaiser_(musician))
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Rothko Lumberjack 7:08

2. Papandanegus Gloriousus 11:50

3. Captain Fortune 4:41

4. Number Four 4:17

5. Twilight In Duckburg 11:24

6. One That All Plectrum Guitar Players Can Relate To The Ending Of 5:43

7. Amber 8:22

8. Carowinds 3:26

9. Number Twenty-Two Is 1:20

10. Letter To Derek 19:41

Related Categories of Interest:

Free Improvisation
Duo Recordings
Before April-2006
Chadbourne. Eugene
Guitarists, &c.
Improvised Music
Victo
Free Improvisation
Duo Recordings
Before April-2006

Search for other titles on the label:
Les Disques Victo.


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