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Eric Chenaux has always had at least one foot in the world of jazz, and by framing his new album, Delights Of My Life, as the work of a trio, he appears to be moving closer to conventional notions of that genre. But, as is often the case with this most uncategorisable of musicians, all is not quite what it seems. For a start, your common and garden jazz trio wouldn’t usually consist of guitar, Wurlitzer (Ryan Driver) and electronic percussion (Philippe Melanson). And few jazz artists are as willing to subsume elements of folk, soul and even a kind of off-centre sophisticated pop into their practice.
In the past, it has been tempting to ask what exactly an Eric Chenaux song is, in the most basic sense. Answers have been offered in the theoretical language of jazz criticism as well as in the mainstream music media. But Chenaux has been around for a long time now, and his consistent distinctiveness has rendered such questions immaterial. A new Chenaux album is an expansion of an extant world. But for anyone coming to Delights of My Life without previously having heard any of his earlier work, it’s probably easiest to say that he creates long, woozy, semi-improvised jazz ballads steeped in an atmosphere of strangeness and humidity. They are, however, oddly welcoming, and this album is as good a place as anywhere to start.
Chenaux has one of those voices – like Liz Fraser or Anonhi – that defies description. His guitar style is likewise unique. His is a music full of warp and bend, of temporal manipulation and the liquifying of solid forms. In this aspect, it bears some comparison with surrealism, so it comes as no surprise to learn that he is a fan of Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Tori Kudo, whom he called ‘a surrealist of the highest order’ in a recent interview in The Quietus. Delights of My Life’s ten-minute opener, This Ain’t Life, dips you instantly but gently into this surreal world. Chenaux’s lyrics, when they are discernible, veer between the impressionistic and the purely abstract, but the vocal melodies into tumbling choruses that show off a penchant for off-kilter pop, while the guitar solos squelch hotly through the tangle of percussion. Structurally, these songs have something in common with the longer pieces on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, where melodic happenstance breaks up the deep time of the evocative, jazzy backdrop, but the mood here is closer and somehow more personal.
The power of repetition is an important tool for Chenaux. Repetition over a small time frame, which focuses the listener (the multiple use of the word ‘shake’ in I’ve Always Said Love), but also longer repetitions, melodic flowers that bloom five or six minutes apart and remind you of music’s uncanny ability to linger beyond its set duration and apparently beyond its means. You quickly come to realise that the word ‘trio’ is insufficient for the range of sounds and specificity of mood on offer here.
The guitar sometimes sounds like a second human voice – like at the start of Hello Eyes, a tender ballad that sounds like Chet Baker taking a blowtorch to 80s adult pop. Melanson’s electronic percussion brings a clean 80s shine to a few of these songs and provides an interesting contrast to Chenaux’s sweltering guitar lines. Some of these songs, like Light Can Be Low, sound like classic soul-pop in a hall of bewilderingly bent mirrors. Here, the percussion and Wurlitzer provide the surety, the bedrock, while Chenaux layers on the weirdness, milking discombobulating sounds from his nylon strings. And the album’s closing title track begins as a smooth slab of slow jazz-funk but soon shoots out bizarre, beautiful tendrils in various directions: clucks and clicks and little muted fireworks of sound.
But sometimes a song will grow out of an apparent percussive and melodic morass into a bright, glistening vista: all it takes is the introduction of Chenaux’s voice at the beginning of These Things, for example, to completely change the feel of the song. This is transformative singing in a literal sense. You can experience the growth of these songs in real time: Simply Fly finds its feet (or wings) right in front of you, the first hesitant percussive steps giving way to a soaring guitar.
Eric Chenaux has an overwhelming back catalogue of solo and collaborative work going back to the early 1990s, and all of it is worth dipping into. But on his last two or three solo records, he hit upon a strange and beautiful alchemy that is quite unlike anything else in popular music (or in jazz, for that matter). Delights of My Life is a continuation of that magic formula but with a more collaborative focus. Chenaux’s spellbinding run of form shows no signs of stopping.
Delights of My Life is released on 31 May 2024 via Constellation/Murailles Music • CST179/MM035
Eric Chenaux has a selection of solo dates in the UK, France and Italy:
26.05.2024 • Acid Horse Festival – The Barge Inn, UK
01.06.2024 • Musiques Tangentes – Le Mans, FR
22.06.2024 • Strange Brew – Bristol, UK
26.06.2024 • Low Four Studios – Manchester, UK
28.06.2024 • St Pancras Old Church – London, UK
17-18.08.2024 • Piedicavallo Festival – Piedicavallo, IT
9-11.10.2024 • Conservatorio – Caligari, IT
