John Hood - Roots Get In Your Eyes

Roots Get In Your Eyes

WVIA's George Graham
welcomes Jordan Chassan.

Long before the proverbial Brother asked Where art thou? and two-million plus quasi-hipsters found new foundation in their own Roots, a contingent of urbane urban ruralists had been toiling craftily in the trenches of Americana, diggin' up the stuff that made this country legend. Some (Nick Cave, Anna Domino) killed for Murder Ballads, culling classics of myth for fresh mystery, others (Lucinda Williams, Joe Ely) took blood from what such balladry had wrought and wrung from the noose-laden family tree a new Rootedness, one that dug deep beneath pavement and came up in the big muddy creek of modern antiquity. Each, in their own divining way, drank from the puddle of past and found it an elixir.

Of that indelible ilk is Jordan Chassan. Chopped from the block of country-punk when X meant band rather than Generation, and first among a long line dance of Big Bad Apple cow-tippers like the Rauch Hands, Chassan and his compadres (see The Young Hegelians) watered their asphalt with whisky and tapped an absent moon with moonshine. It was as if Hank Williams had bedded with Patti Smith and birthed a bunch of bratty and irascible rascalites. They may have been living in the Velvet's underground, but they were taking Woody Guthrie's train.

Flash forward a decade and change and the steam still hasn't cleared. Chassan, like some Pilgrim progressing to a songster's Mecca, long ago made his way to Nashville, scene of the earliest cries and whispers, crimes and misdemeanors, and set himself a place at tradition's table.

East of Bristol, West of Knoxville (Strong Recordings) hallmarks that spot, the dead center of an open road that begins in a Music Row truckstop and ends on the twelfth of never. Smokey and lonely, tuneful and clever, Chassan's latest is a quiet chronicle of a life to be foretold, a recount of foretelling, where accident happens, will happen again, and the life's all the stronger for having lived it.

Stronger still for putting the all to that tradition called Song. Connected to a current that the CMA rarely recognizes but which is nevertheless inherent in every Tennessee waltz 'round the corner of then and there, here and elsewhere. It's a buzz that runs through John Prine and Mose Alison (Chassan produced daughter Amy) and JJ Cale and Woody and Arlo and Ralph Stanley and Lee Greenwood and John Doe and Tom Waits and Dr. John and Leon Russell and Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt and Randy Newman and Jimmie Rogers and Steve Earle and James McMurtry, to name a very many few, and it's an electricity that continues to run through it all now, with every exit taken or missed, every road more traveled than the last. Like his forebears, Chassan makes melody of the whistle and the hum of something spun from the holy trinity of highway, byway, and my way.

Call it: An individual's collision with the small world-at-large.

If you Roger Millered Wilco you might come up with something this radly trad.

Tracked to proverbial two-inch at his apt own Inglewood SoundBarn, an analog period studio of vintage proportion, Chassan's East is as about Down South as a fella can get without crossing Dante. Not that it's hellish, mind you, but that it's purgatorious, the soundtrack of the way between the stations of birth and death. Life. The wicked grin of a torn tear, the comfort of melancholy's anatomy, the Bright Eyed wake of the merrily weary, the warm shudder and shake of heartache and break. Tenored to an effortless ease, Chassan makes the hard life sound swingingly easy.

And charming. On Monday, November 14th, as part of another in a stellar series of WVIA's George Graham-hosted Homegrown Music Concerts (with the Dakota Duo, the men behind The Buoys who did the legendary "Timothy"), Jordan Chassan will bring to bear all the charm and the joy that hard-living can hang from a song, and he will bring it all to bear in brilliant, beamingly blue.

Like the man sings in "A Day Like Today": "It's hard to be blue on a day like today, but I think I can do it/ It's hard to be blue, but I'm up to the task, Ya gotta really put your mind to it/ All I gotta do is start thinkin' of you, and pretty soon I'm blue as can be Ain't even tryin'/Already cryin'/On a day like today."