Smoke We Must

I have returned to Montreal just in time. This city, and Toronto, and Canada, and North America too has just waved goodbye to one of its best. Eric Chenaux, genius guitar player, has relocated to Paris.

This is sad news for everybody who ever had the pleasure of listening to Eric’s records, or taking in his live shows. Hopefully he will be back periodically to perform. In the meantime, let’s pay tribute.

Starting up in the punk band Phleg Camp, Eric has performed in many diverse and excellent projects around Toronto and Montreal. His solo material, however, is what I am most familiar with and what I have enjoyed during my tenure in this city.

I first heard Eric via an MP3 sent to me over MSN Messenger (God this makes me feel old). A friend of mine with distinguished tastes sent me “Worm & Gear” from Dull Lights, and I was immediately taken with its wonky British Isle folk sound. Kind of like if Fairport Convention had too much to drink one night. As any actor knows, however, feigning drunkenness is incredibly hard to do: Eric’s playing is deliberate, the result of many years of intense study, and most of all, experimentation. The man has built for himself a unique vocabulary on perhaps the most bland and overplayed instrument of all: the guitar. If you have trouble making out what he’s saying, it’s not because his speech is slurred. He’s just invented a new and beautiful language. Glossolalia at its finest.

We are, after all, talking about the guy who put a whammy bar on his old and very valuable guitar when no store in Toronto would do it for him, the same guy who’s still trying to figure out how to put one on his classical guitar. I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard the whammy bar used in a way that didn’t make me wanna “whammy” the wanker using it. Eric just defies expectations, I guess. He also uses a wah-wah pedal. What the fuck, right?

It’s not just the guitar playing, though. He’s also got a real gift for songcraft and singing. No doubt about it, he’s a crooner, evoking a marriage of free jazz and folksong in a dulcet tenor. This is hard to do. Eric does it. How?

I tried to find out myself, tried to get lessons with the man before he took off, but he was busy playing music with everybody because everybody wants to play with him. We’ve shot some emails back and forth and I am hopeful, but I think probably the best thing to do is just listen, listen, listen to the records. It’s so much more than a humble guitar nerd’s fantasy come true (although that too). It’s real music: distinct, articulate, and excellent.

Start with Warm Weather With Ryan Driver and work backwards. Or just buy it all. That too.