If you imagine the history of improvisational rock n’ roll as a river whose source is the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band, and its mouth as young guns like Billy Strings, it flows through musicians such as Oteil Burbridge and Lamar Williams Jr.
Burbridge, who like many in the genre got his start playing with the eccentric and esoteric Col. Bruce Hampton, went on to hold down the bassist role in the Allmans from 1997 until the band’s demise in 2014, and was a founding member of Dead & Company. Williams’s father was the bass player for the Allmans in the 1970s, as well as with Sea Level, a jazzy offshoot project. The younger Williams plays with Allmans legacy groups Trouble No More and the Allman Betts Family Revival.
A duo that seemed fated to form, Burbridge and Williams on May 1 will release their debut album, “The Offering,” which draws from the same pool that spawned their earlier work with legacy bands and beyond, but it is its own animal. With elements of trance, Gospel and Southern rock, the duo, with the help of some friends, including producer Alan Evans of the band Soulive, recorded in the Icelandic isolation of Flóki Studios.
The seed of the album was Burbridge’s loneliness while his wife was away during their first year of marriage.
“She left to live in Africa for like a year, and I was super depressed, and she was trying to learn the banjo,” he says. “And I picked up her banjo and just got on YouTube and then kind of went down the banjo rabbit hole. And I started working on these exercises to try to figure out the tuning and also playing with three fingers instead of with two, like I normally do on the bass. And so finger picking was completely new. The tuning was completely new. And I was just trying to orient my brain as to what it actually was. And when I started to see things, I kind of made up these little exercises to learn chord shapes and to learn how to play rhythms, how to play odd times. And then these things kind of turned into the beginnings of songs.”
He sent the songs to Williams. “I was like, hey, do you think you hear lyrics? Do you think you could sing over this? Like, I know it’s out of left field, right?”
Williams says: “From the beginning of hearing all of this music, I was instantly hearing lyrics before he even said something. So we were on the same page. And a buddy of mine, Victor Clark, we both heard them at the same time, and we just were enthralled with it and we just dug right into, and it just kept flowing. We didn’t rush the process. We were just kind of leisurely writing with each other, you know? And we throw it back to Oteil, and he’s like, wow, that’s great. So we’re like, OK, we’re onto something. We write another one. Send it back to Oteil again. He’s like, wow, that’s great again. And so we just kept doing that over the process of hearing the tunes. And, you know, they kept developing and this is the outcome pretty much.”
The pair met in Boca Raton, where Burbridge lives, to rehearse, but the pandemic scotched any further plans. In the meantime, Burbridge released his Jerry Garcia-Robert Hunter tribute album, “A Lovely View of Heaven.”
At the Dead Ahead festival in 2014, Burbridge’s band Oteil & Friends, featuring Williams. played one of the tunes from their back-and-forth writing sessions called “Love and War,” “and the crowd went nuts, man,” he says. He released the live version, “and people went berserk. And I was like, wait a minute. I said this is like 10 years old, you know?”
Burbridge and Williams trekked to Flóki in Iceland, where he made “A Lovely View of Heaven,” to record what would become “The Offering.” “Love and War” made the cut.
“It’s amazing out there on this peninsula with the ocean, and it’s such a tranquil place to write in or to just produce in,” Williams says. “So you’re there locked and loaded, you know? You’re there for that specific reason, so your brain doesn’t go anywhere, but you’re ready for it. It really prepares you. You zoom right in.”
Burbridge chimes in: “When you walk out of the studio, I don’t think it’s even 50 yards maybe that you’re in the Arctic Ocean. And 60 km from there is the Arctic Circle, so you’re with Santa Claus and the elves. Like straight up. And now after being there, I think Santa Claus and the elves are all real. I don’t know about the elves and the Huldufólk and the hidden people, because we were all kind of deep with it. It’s an incredibly mystical place.”
Oteil & Friends, which features Burbridge, Williams, Melvin Seals, Jason Crosby, John Morgan Kimock and Tom Guarna, will tackle some of the songs from “The Offering” on a run of shows that includes two nights in Ardmore for the Unlimited Devotion festival (May 9 and 10) and two at Brooklyn Bowl (May 13 and 14).
“It’s going to take us a while to get to all of [songs from ‘The Offering’] because, people might not realize this, but setlists to me are all about tempos. Well, it’s all about contrast. So you gotta realize I have a bunch of my own songs from way back, going back to the Oteil and the Peacemakers Days, which is like 1998, right? Then I have Allman Brothers stuff. I’ve got Col. Bruce Hampton and The Aquarium Rescue Unit stuff. Grateful Dead stuff. Jerry Garcia Band stuff. Then I have our new stuff, stuff from my album that I did before. Then I gotta do some ‘Lovely View of Heaven,’ but I can cover that. If I do some of the ballads from ‘Lovely View of Heaven,’ I’ve covered Grateful Dead, right? We also want to give the fans more. You gotta give the fans what they want, man.”
For many who come to see Oteil & Friends, that means Dead songs, “and I love it,” he says. “I never get tired of Allman Brothers tunes. I never get tired of Grateful Dead tunes. Somehow they wrote all this timeless stuff as very, very young men. My voice works better for singing Garcia-Hunter stuff than even my own songs. That’s why I got Lamar. Lamar sings my stuff better than me. That’s why he’s here.”
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