Music Reviews: Blues

Albert King teaches a master class in blues guitar soloing on this classic Stax release recorded June,1968 at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, opening with a funked up version of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" that may not immediately be recognizable to Herbie fans but once you catch the groove, oh wow!Next up is a scorched earth take on King's "Blues Power", his defining song. King's playing is hard-etched deliberate,... Read More

Series curator Scott Billington says it all in his obi strip annotation: "In the 1960s James may have startled listeners the most, because the haunting quality of his music had only deepened with time". Scott was referring to James's eerie, almost ghostly falsetto vocals that first appeared on record back in 1931 on the Paramount label.This outing recorded January 9 and 10 1966 at Vanguard's 214 West 23rd Street New York City studio, is... Read More

The mystery is why this 1959 Riverside recording wasn't released until 1964, and even then, according to Craft Recordings, only in the U.K. True, Riverside was essentially a jazz label, but then why record Hooker in the first place unadorned if not to release it? Hooker had been recording electric blues for Vee-Jay but Riverside wanted acoustic and in fact released in 1960 The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker recorded at the same sessions that produced this... Read More

On July 18, 1951, Bill Broonzy got off a plane in Brussels, was met by a member of the Hot Club of France and began his first tour of Europe. A Black American guitar playing, self accompanied blues singer was a little understood novelty in Europe in 1951. Blues was considered by jazz critics and fans to be a primitive form of jazz that had flourished in the 1920s only to degenerate into a simplistic, sexually suggestive dance music. Very few Europeans, only those who... Read More

In 1957, Robert "Mack" McCormick began working as a cab driver in Houston, Texas. He was twenty-seven, and to that point, his life had been one of debilitating depression, rootlessness, dissatisfaction, and failure. He and his mother had moved twenty times before he was sixteen. Listening to jazz and big band broadcasts was the joy of his drab and lonely life. At fifteen, he hitchhiked to New Orleans to meet Orin Blackstone, who was compiling Index To Jazz,... Read More

Josh Smith records the epic inner struggle between music and hatred, which provides the backdrop to his review of the late Republican operative's infamous vanity project.

If we set our musical Wayback Machines to 1976 what do we find dominating the radio landscape? ABBA had two of their biggest singles that year, “Dancing Queen” and “Fernando” and Queen was king with “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” was a monster hit, as was Elton John and Kiki Dee’s, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”. If there is one commonality between those five songs, it’s the slick and glossy - perhaps even hedonistic - production values. For better... Read More

Don’t let the blues get you down. In fact, sometimes, a good blues session can be an uplifting experience, perhaps even cathartic, if you like. The blues aren’t played to make us feel bad, on the contrary, they exist to remind us that we’re not alone with our troubles, and while we may not find the answers we need, sometimes misery loves company and that companionship can be very valuable especially when it comes in the form of a well-pressed piece of vinyl.Such is... Read More

In 1961, John Lee Hooker recorded "Burnin’", an album accompanied by an early version of Motown's legendary Funk Brothers band for Vee Jay Records in one session, probably four hours in length. Vee Jay was an independent label based in Chicago, owned by an African American married couple, Vivian Carter and James Bracken, which had achieved considerable success selling R&B, blues, gospel, and jazz records to Black audiences. Hooker had been recording... Read More

Might I interest you in a solo bass album? I hope so. Bassist Rick Rosato has been living in New York City since 2007 and touring worldwide (he's featured on vibraphonist Joel Ross' 2022 double LP The Parable of The Poet and on many other records). Then Covid hit and like many other musicians he found himself without gigs and spending a lot of time at home.For his first album as leader, Rosato decided to go solo, inspired by his home alone pandemic... Read More

If you didn’t know anything about Karen Dalton when you dropped the stylus on one of her records, you’d quickly get the sense that her life probably hadn’t been an easy one. Mournful, and sung in a voice that parsed the terrain between Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, the songs on the 50th Anniversary Edition of the singer’s second and final long player can be a tough listen. But thanks to multiple reissue campaigns, her work has filtered on down through five plus... Read More

(This review, written by Carl E. Baugher, originally appeared in Issue 5/6, Winter 1995/96.)The lineage of American electric guitar is a long, rich, exciting thread. It runs through Muddy Waters, Albert King, Albert Collins, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix and the kid from Texas, Stevie Ray Vaughan. A plane crash in late August 1990 took Vaughan way too soon but his music sounds just as fresh and vital today as ever. Stevie never made a bad album so putting together a... Read More

(This review originally appeared in Issue 5/6, Winter 1995/96.)What a shock to the audiophile system: an all-analog reissue of a CD-only release. When I first reviewed this engaging set back in 1992 I remarked that it sounded like a good recording was buried under the digital glaze, but who could be sure? Did I ever expect to see it issued on AAA vinyl? No. But here it is, courtesy of Classic Records.Sonny Landreth is a killer slide guitarist, electric guitarist,... Read More

(This review originally appeared in Issue 5/6, Winter 1995/96.)I thought Pop Staples’ version of J.B. Lenoir’s “Down In Mississippi” (Pointblank/Charisma 92147-2) was powerful—and it was, but the version Terry Evans puts down here shakes the firmament. As I write this, two neo-Nazi idiots—soldiers from Fort Bragg, NC—have just been arrested for cold-blooded murdering a Black couple walking down the street in their own neighborhood (not that it would have mattered... Read More