Wharf Chambers is an ideal location in which Eric Chenaux can perform. Just like the Canadian guitarist, singer, improvisor, and composer, the building lies somewhere off the beaten track, away from the centre, almost hidden. The venue and musician also share a strong commitment towards freedom of expression, collaboration, and independence.
Eric Chenaux’s most recent studio recording was last year’s Delights of My Life, credited to the Eric Chenaux Trio. On this album, he collaborated with fellow Torontonians, Ryan Driver (Wurlitzer and voice) and Philippe Melanson (electronic percussion and voice), and he played a series of live dates with these two musicians in Canada as recently as last month. But Chenaux is now over in the UK and Europe, on his own, though four of the half dozen songs he performs here this evening are drawn from Delights of My Life.
But armed with his guitar and a series of tape loops and effects it is to his 2018 solo offering Slowly Paradise that Eric Chenaux goes first. And the song in question is the delightfully meandering cosmic pilgrimage that is ‘Wild Moon.’ And just as the first word of the title of the album from which the song is taken so accurately says, in Chenaux’s world there is no particular reason to hurry. As he tells us right from the outset, “it takes me a while to get through some of these tunes.”
If Chenaux’s guitar playing is a thing of wonder – all abstract technique and seductive texture – when he opens his mouth to sing you are then transported to another place. That this beautiful, tender, pure tenor should emanate from this unassuming, bespectacled, bearded chap sat on the stage in the Naples Botanical Garden trucker’s cap and matching sweater and slacks is difficult to fathom. As a couple of very approximate touchstones you could think of Tim Buckley in his upper registers or on the sublime ‘I’ve Always Said Love’ an improv-Van Morrison singing ‘Madame George.’
Eric Chenaux suggests that “listening (to music) is a form of letting go…of all that crap that surrounds us,” and these sentiments are never more true than on the closing “This Ain’t Life” – the opening track on Delights of My Life – where we feel a huge sense of liberation as Chenaux stretches and repeats the coda to the song. And with typical kindness and humility he then wishes us all a pleasant journey into the rest of the night.
Photos: Simon Godley
More photos of Eric Chenaux at Wharf Chambers
