New Release: Fed Up With Bass – My Most Extensive Collaboration Yet With Eugene Chadbourne

I'm thrilled to announce the release of Fed Up With Bass, a double-CD that marks the deepest and most wide-ranging collaboration to date between myself and the inimitable Eugene Chadbourne.

Our creative partnership has stretched across time zones and stages—from ensemble work in England, Germany, and New York—to a new kind of remote experimentation birthed during the global pandemic. With live performance on hold, Eugene began a daily subscription project called The Head of Books. The series was inspired by a comment from John Zorn and nodded to The Book of Heads, a collection of Zorn’s solo guitar compositions written for Eugene. Each day, subscribers received a new solo guitar piece—a gesture of continuity and connection in uncertain times.

Sergio Amadori described The Head of Books perfectly as "a way of maintaining contact in insecure times." And for me, it became much more than that: a launching pad for an entirely new body of duo work. Eugene encouraged contributors to incorporate the solos however they wished. I dove in headfirst and began layering bass responses—sometimes sparse, sometimes dense, but always uniquely reacting to the material spontaneously in real-time. Over time, I presented Eugene with dozens of pieces, each transforming his soli into something new.

Eugene, of course, couldn’t resist poking fun, noting, “I don’t need no steenking bass player!” Yet the title Fed Up With Bass was born from one of Eugene's own pieces, Fed Up With the Baltimore Airport, and grew naturally from the filenames I sent back: “Fed Up… with bass.”

What began as remote musical conversations has become this new release—raw, spontaneous, and deeply collaborative.

Fed Up With Bass is available now as a double CD on the Public Eyesore label. It’s noisy, soulful, questioning, and very much of its time. I hope you dig it.

— Jair-Rohm