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 August 15, 2006 Got Blues? Just last week, my wife and I went to the local blues society’s get-together/jam session, which the organization holds at a VFW hall in a nearby suburb. My wife occasionally goes with her friends, but the kids were at camp and this time I was able to tag along. You have to drive down a stone lane to get to the VFW, a bland-looking building that might hold 100 people. We got there at about 8:30, in time for the first set, and the parking lot was already beginning to fill. Musicians sign up to play a half-hour set each, and four sets were already lined up on the board when we walked in. Sometimes a band plugged into the gear provided, sometimes it was just musicians who show up every week to play with guys they know on the local blues scene. Quality varied. Some guitarists played loud rock riffs they thought sounded like blues. One guy, playing an old hollow-body Gibson, played the real thing, and with feeling. Each time he stepped up to solo, he said something new. One young guitarist and singer played finger-style guitar on an old Fender Stratocaster and, accompanied by a bass player and a drummer, did a lot of lesser-known blues tunes. He did Earl King’s "Let’s Make a Better World" and tore it up. He didn’t take a single solo. I came away from that evening feeling that everyone in that room was a true blues lover. The people there, blue-collar and white-collar, ranged in age from 20 to 60, but most of what they played and we heard was music that seemed old. How many times can you listen to "The Sky Is Crying" or "Stormy Monday"? These great songs have been robbed of their original power by endless repetition. If blues is to last, the music must be renewed even as its past is respected. A few weeks earlier, a friend of mine and I had gone to see John Lee Hooker, Jr., at a bar about 20 minutes from my house. Hooker looks a little like his dad, but his music is, as he describes it, "two parts R&B, one part jazz and ‘down home blues.’" His four-piece backing band included a young guitar slinger I’d have carded had I been tending bar. It was a strong evening of blues. Hooker writes good songs, his choices of cover tunes were unusual enough to keep things interesting (well, he did do "Mustang Sally"), and the band was tuned to his every move. Hooker put on a classic blues and R&B show, and he sounded fresh.
"4 Hours Straight/Blues Man" is nearly nine minutes of bluesman-as-legend-and-lover braggadocio, and Hooker plays it straight. It’s the closest thing to a predictable tune on the disc, but Hooker’s lyrics (a narrative he added to Z.Z. Hill’s "Blues Man"), along with the simple but very effective arrangement, make it work. The horn arrangements throughout Cold as Ice are clever and straightforward, and all the supporting players are at the top of their game. The album shows that you can remain true to the blues while expanding the boundaries of the form.
Moss doesn’t break any new songwriting ground on Live at Chan’s, but his own tunes stand up well beside the classics he covers, such as Jimmy Witherspoon’s "Your Red Wagon" and Magic Slim’s "It’s Good in Your Neighborhood." I’d like to hear Moss explore some new territory, but he has the classic Chicago blues sound nailed down so well that I’d be happy to hear him make records like this one for the rest of his career. Live at Chan’s is 76 minutes of jumping, burning blues. Duke Robillard owns a lot of guitars, and he probably plays all of them on his new disc, Guitar Groove-A-Rama. In the liner notes he gives the details of the guitars he uses on each track, as well as any modifications he’s made to them. While that information is probably of interest only to guitar heads, it does help explain how Robillard is able to give each tune a distinctive tonal quality. Guitar Groove-A-Rama covers a lot of blues and jazz territory, and each song has its own sound and groove. Robillard was a founding member of Room Full of Blues, and has played with the Fabulous Thunderbirds and nearly every notable blues guitarist around. He’s a master who never lets himself coast, always trying new things and approaching each solo as an opportunity to try something he hasn’t done before. He sings well, too. He also plays on and produced songwriter Al Basile’s Groovin’ in the Mood Room. Like Robillard, Basile stays true to the blues while finding novel approaches to keep the music vibrant.
Often, when I hear something from a new blues disc on the radio or see a blues band at a bar, I feel disconnected from the music. A lot of new blues has been so influenced by rock that it is actually a subgenre of classic rock. But when I play a Muddy Waters or Charley Patton recording, or the recordings I’ve mentioned here, I can still hear the power of this deceptively simple form. Nick Moss isn’t breaking new ground, but he’s doing more than merely retracing old steps -- he’s making the music his own. John Lee Hooker, Jr., is trying to revitalize the blues by injecting into it some current imagery and concerns. There’s still life in the blues. Sometimes, we just have to look a little harder for it. …Joseph Taylor
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Hooker’s new disc, Cold as
Ice, is his first for Telarc. The first line he sings on it lets you know he
wants his music to be up to date: "I got a text message late last night / and when I
read it I couldn’t go back to sleep." Hooker writes songs in the familiar blues
form, but widens his definition of blues to include Southern soul influences. Good for him
-- his songs avoid the clichés that plague so many current blues releases. The title
track has a strong jazz feel, and Hooker’s urbane singing, somewhat reminiscent of
Lou Rawls’, helps him carry it off nicely. John Garcia, Jr., and Jeffrey James Horan
should satisfy anyone’s blues-guitar requirements, but they don’t dominate the
disc, which is driven by Hooker’s voice and songs.
Chicago’s Nick Moss and the Flip
Tops made a very likable studio disc last year, Sadie Mae, and they’ve
just released Live at Chan’s, a fiery document of the band in
performance. Moss and his band are purists -- you won’t hear any rock influences in
their blues -- but their affection for the music and their impressive chops make for an
exciting disc. Moss burns it up on guitar, and allows himself to stretch out more live
than he does in the studio, but he shares the spotlight with his excellent pianist, Willie
Oshawny, and his bassist and harpist, Gerry Hundt (when Hundt plays harp, Oshawny picks up
the bass chores). As good as Moss is, he gives everyone in the band the space to play with
the same skill and enthusiasm he does himself.
God’s Tattoos is
William Lee Ellis’s third disc for Yellow Dog. It was produced by Jim Dickinson, who
has worked with everyone from Big Star to Bob Dylan. Ellis, an accomplished acoustic
guitarist and a dazzling slide player, carries on the gospel blues tradition of Rev. Gary
Davis and Mississippi John Hurt. He does a beautiful, simple arrangement of Hurt’s
"Here Am I, Lord Send Me" with his wife, Julie, singing harmony. His own
"Snakes in My Garden" and "Four Horses" fall firmly within country
blues boundaries, but several times Ellis goes off in his own direction. The title tune is
a rumba, and "When Leadbelly Walked the River Like Christ" is a moving
instrumental that defies classification. Ellis’s voice sounds a bit like Eric
Clapton’s, but he reaches deeper, and his music has more spiritual resonance. Strict
blues purists may take issue with one or two tracks here. They shouldn’t. This is
American music, played beautifully and with great feeling.