Jack Treese - Jack Treese

RCA Victor - LP

France, 1980

Folk / Bluegrass / Ambient guitar

Ridiculously overlooked penultimate album by Périgord-based American guitarist and banjoist musician. Admittedly not reaching heights as stellar as those of his final LP, Love Can Make It Work, this self-titled album shares with its successor its crepuscular qualities, and definitely has its lot of great tunes. Excellent album.

Maybe, was it because Jack Treese had been living far from his native Minnesota for so long, that his unique take on Country music seems lightyears away from the sound of 1980's american Country. Jack Treese's music gets us to hear a parallel history of bluegrass, one in which bluegrass merged with acid folk, ECM's atmospheric jazz and baroque music revival. 

Jack Treese's music is its own thing, in a very discreet, quiet way. It's the music of a man who had been crossing paths with French avant-gardes in silence. A not-so-isolated music hermit, who, just like Gigi Masin, would be happy to leave his Périgord fief for a few days to contribute to the work of groundbreaking artists like Areski & Fontaine or Sonorhc. And just like Gigi Masin, the music Jack Treese released under his own name is of the most intimate kind.

There are the nagging ballads led by Treese's warm and soft tremolo voice, like "Sweet Emptiness" or "Barnswallow", that resurrect age-old melodies of American Folk music as recorded by Harry Smith; and also, these heart-rending instrumentals, bare, like "Les Fleurs du Mal" or "Reminiscence", or mingled with field recordings of waves or children in a playground on "Recess 2" or "Wind And Waves". Timeless bonfire music. (VG+/VG+)