MAOZ / CHADBOURNE DUET
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ABOUT THE MUSICIANS
ABOUT Eyal Maoz
In a career that spans decades and countries, Eyal Maoz is a guitarist, performer, and composer; he is an ensembles leader at albums released for Tzadik, Out Now, Piadrums, Ayler, and Chant Records, and a member of John Zorn’s Abraxas and Cobra. His latest 2021 collaborative release, Transliminal Rites (featuring Grammy Award winner Frank London), was released on Orenda Records, and he recently performed with two-times Grammy winner Jakob Dinesen in Bangkok. He has played on the stages of major music festivals worldwide, including the Montreal Jazz Festival, Red Sea International Jazz Festival, NYC Winter JazzFest, Newport Jazz Festival, Adelaide Festival, Australia, Jazz at Marciac, France, the Tzadik Music Festival, Israel, and more. His collaborative album of “Hypercolor” came out in in 2015, garnering rave reviews, including this Jazz Times™ statement: “It was worth the wait, as the band lets fly with a rough-edged, wildly inventive amalgam of punkish melodic provocation and rhythmic adventurism…” His ensemble Edom released a second album at Tzadik Records, following the band’s highly acclaimed album with John Medeski. His other renowned collaborative project, 9 Volt (with Tim Berne as a special guest), released its album to garner a rave from the New York Times: “Maoz…thrashes toward an expressive new-breed fusion.” More recently, in 2021, NYC’s Downtown Music Gallery Magazine wrote, “Eyal Maoz is one of the best electric guitarists to emerge from the Downtown scene over the past decade plus. Each song here gives Maoz a chance to add his magic touch, crunch or incisive lead guitar licks while never showing off and always in favor of the song they are the center of…Wonderful, powerful in so many great ways!” MTV and NPR have both featured him. Eyal’s string quartet composition Boded won the Orchestra of Our Time Open Score Project in New York, the prestigious Scorchio Quartet recorded it, and the Praxis Quartet performed it. The notable Israeli poet Ronny Someck invited Eyal to create a musical program with him, and the result was a series of performances in Italy, to rave reviews.
ABOUT Eugene Chadbourne
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.