Eugene Chadbourne/René Lussier - L'Oasis

Victo (084)

The music that makes up L’Oasis comes from two concerts, one from Paris in 1998, the other from last year’s Victoriaville Festival. Guitarists Eugene Chadbourne and René Lussier had known one another for years at the time of the first show, and they came to it with no preconceptions of any sort. Brandishing an acoustic guitar and banjo, Lussier makes an interesting counterpart to Chadbourne’s more eclectic methods on electric. The Paris cuts are mostly improvised – “I Wish We Could Do This Live” consists almost entirely of high-intensity pick scrapes on the steel strings – though there often exists the backbone of Lussier’s precision plucking and strumming, bluegrass all the way. The Victo tracks come as a welcome surprise. Lussier, a devout enthusiast of Western Swing, had different ideas in mind when he unpacked from his trip to Canada. With several days to practice, arrange, and deliberate, the duo’s set was comprised exclusively of Western traditionals and some by late heroes Leon McAuliffe and Doug Sahm. Their sublime reading of the instrumental “Buckdancer’s Choice” is a lesson in bluegrass hop, guitar and banjo atop each other’s every move through a windy but meticulous string of quick changes and repeated resolution. The Western tunes are limited in chords by their nature, but Chadbourne in particular has fun in the spontaneous creation of tangential scales and quick-time cadence shifting over Lussier’s rhythms. Chadbourne proves himself a competent singer, Southern drawl and all, even in his ad-libbing of Sahm’s lyrics in “Louis Riel.”

    Well I come from down in Texas
    And we’ve got lots of heroes,
    (Of course that doesn’t include George Bush, Jr. –
    A complete idiot).

Ho hum. Bush can’t even find escape in niche music from Canadian improvisers at a contemporary jazz festival. But the duo treats the Western stuff with an affection musicians can only have when they are in love with the tradition and the art it has spurned. As there are two divergent styles represented here, the duo saw fit to interlace the improv material with the traditional. A good idea. While still unbalanced, the sequencing is eccentric like the tunes themselves, making for a unique hour or so of music. Guitar fans should certainly seek it out.

~Alan Jones