It was inevitable that Oteil Burbridge and Lamar Williams Jr. would find kinship together. The Allman Brothers Band’s low-end runs through both musicians: Williams is the son of ’70s ABB bassist Lamar Williams; Burbridge assumed that role in the late ’90s. With The Offering, Burbridge and Williams tap into that familial energy for a collaborative album of originals that nod to those roots but sprout up new branches in surprising ways. Most notably, Burbridge plays banjo throughout The Offering and most of these songs started on banjo nearly a decade ago with Williams adding lyrics to Burbridge’s rhythmic melodies.
In the time since those early writing sessions, Burbridge joined the Grateful Dead universe, and Williams sang with the New Mastersounds and the North Mississippi Allstars. When their schedules freed up, the duo flew to Iceland to track eight songs with producer Alan Evans (Soulive) and members of Burbridge’s rotating Oteil and Friends project—Melvin Seals, John Morgan Kimock, Weedie Braimah, Jason Crosby, and Tom Guarna.
Banjo is the driving force for many of these songs, but you wouldn’t call it bluegrass. Much like Béla Fleck, Burbridge takes a jazzy, driving, groove-based approach to the instrument with Williams adding his soulful vocals, a dynamic evident on the uplifting “The Way We Rise” and the socially minded “Love & War.” As a whole, The Offering mixes elements of soul (“Hush”), jazz, blues (“First Born”), West African rhythms, and jamband-style improv. “If Their Lips Moving” includes a heady jam section that sounds like “Eleanor Rigby” meets “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” because no matter how far they get from it, you can’t fully keep the Allman DNA out of the music Burbridge and Williams make together.
