Reviews

Otis Grand

I pulled this CD from the case, put it in my CD player, and hit "play" as I absent-mindedly read the liner notes, which raved about Otis Grand's guitar playing. For example, I learned that he has been named the UK Blues Guitarist of the Year several years in a row by the British Blues Connection,and has received three W.C. Handy nominations here. All because of his guitar playing, I assumed, since the liner notes went on to place him in the context of the Texas school of guitar virtuosity. Then his voice lunged out of the speakers, and I thought, "My God, he really can sing!" It turns out that the voice actually belonged to Curtis Salgado, who began with Robert Cray and fronted Roomful of Blues for a time, and it's a hell of a voice. Salgado is joined on this recording by Sugar Ray Norcia, who used to sing with Ronnie Earl and now fronts Roomful,and he's also joined by Kim Wilson of the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Tremendously appealing singers, all of them, and one reason why this is truly such an appealing album. Another reason is rhythm section,yet another is the horn section... but the biggest reason is Otis' guitar playing! In the contemporary style, Otis plays in many styles, but they're all wonderfully integrated. He also is a fine songwriter, which allows him to showcase his stylistic versatility.There's two Magic Sam covers (for some reason these are relatively tame), some jumpin' tunes in the manner of T-Bone Walker, some pleas for love in the manner of Bobby Bland, a few Otis Rush slow burns, and Kim Wilson's "Things I Forgot To Do," his rueful answer to Guitar Slim's "Things I Used To Do." On the later number, Otis switches between Slim type licks to tense, Albert Collins flurries, offering a nice stylistic as well as emotional contrast within the same song. OK, OK, no more "name the influence"; the excellent singing, the excellent band sound, and Otis' consistent good taste make this recording all of a piece. No, Otis Grand isn't breaking new ground here, but he's a hell of a lot of fun, and not only for guitarists.

Tony Nassar
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R.L. Burnside

I first saw R.L. Burnside in Deep Blues, the excellent blues documentary narrated by the scholar Robert Palmer. Palmer and Dave Stewart of the British pop group the Eurythmics are looking for the real blues in northern Mississippi, and get a tip that they should visit R.L. Burnside. They find him living in the kind of poverty most people can only imagine. He brings his old St. Louis Music electric guitar onto the porch of his shack (there is no other word) and launches into the hypnotic, droning "Jumper on the Line." Instantly, everyone in the movie theater must have begun tapping his or her foot. I certainly did, and Dave Stewart did, as the camera cleverly focuses on his expensive cowboy boots, virtual parodies of the classic rural American work shoes. Later, Stewart explains that the blues is where it all began.Apparently producing synthesizer pop hasn't damaged his musical judgement. I knew I would have to hear R.L. Burnside again, and when his first CD came out on Fat Possum, a new label dedicated to bringing the sounds of the hill country north of the delta to the public, I snapped it up. R.L. Burnside and the Sound Machine's Bad Luck City was a fine slice of tough rural funk, just like what you might hear at a party when Burnside and his younger family members are providing the music. Burnside's new Too Bad Jim is something else again.
The historian James C. Cobb, in his The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity, shows how the Mississippi Delta, far from being somehow primordially isolated from modern America, was in fact formed by the most modern kinds of economic pressure. Tremendous profits were to be had by entrepreneurially gifted whites who figured out how to use Jim Crow to exact cheap labor to work the incredibly fertile lands of the Delta. The emotional intensity of Delta blues, then, far from being especially African, and contrary to Palmer's earlier book Deep Blues, was formed by essentially American experiences of social dislocation. African-Americans of the less fertile lands north of the Delta, however, could preserve many distinctively African musical and communal practices (see Deep Blues for more examples). Which brings us to Too bad Jim. For this recording, R.L. Burnside picked up his slide, called his young blonde protege` Kenny Brown, the superbly attentive drummer Calvin Jackson and bassist Dwayne Burnside, and together they generate droning, churning, dance grooves reminiscent of Fred McDowell, who was in fact R.L.'s longtime neighbor.Some blues standards--Lightnin' Hopkin's Short-Haired Women, John Lee Hooker's When My First Wife Left Me,-- all surrender to the drone, along with such idiosyncratic local standards as Old Black Mattie and Goin' Down South. Sure the beat turns around, in time-honored blues fashion, but the pulse, the real beat is always there. This is unfussy music, hell, it's sloppy in the best way. It has nothing to do with the flood of recreations of various blues styles, to say nothing of guitar virtuosity, that afflict the blues scene. This isn't virtuosic music, either, but if you think it's easy to play this kind of droning dance music, try it; you'll almost invariably lose your concentration or speed up too much. This is music for drinking and dancing. It's not music for admiring, but I admire Fat Possum for it's dedication to bringing such sounds to the public. This recording hasn't left my car stereo in three weeks. Take that as a recommendation.

Tony Nassar
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Ernie Williams

On January 26, 1996, I had the pleasure of seeing Ernie Williams and his Wildcats rock the Louisiana Community Bar and Grill in Manhattan. Ernie is the benign patriarch of the blues scene in Albany, and in 1994, the Mayor of Albany declared an Ernie Williams Day. The night I saw him, Ernie was a few days away from his 71st birthday, and the years, 57 of them spent entertaining lovers of the blues, have not diminished his power. Ernie's band is much younger, consisting of Mark Emanation and Joe Mele on guitar (both of them fine players), the former in an intense, Freddy King style with long string bends, the later in a punctual, conversation style more like B. B.'s; both of them distinctive slide players to boot-- and the Berklee--trained Rocky Petrocelli on drums, and they can funk, they can rock, they can shuffle, and they can also do a rollicking Chuck Berry take on Dylan's "Highway 61." Some highlights of the evening were a sweet take on Elmore James' "It Hurts Me Too," where Ernie replaces Elmore's anguished reproach with the dignified assertion, "When things go wrong, wrong with you, it hurts me too." Another highlight was a churning, Stonesy take on the traditional gospel number "The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow," which Mark told me Ernie has known for 67 years. Finally, Ernie invested the often angry " Five Long Years" with the wisdom of a man who's seen it all and hasn't let it get him down, while the guitars whispered, chattered, and sang. Ernie's age, which ain't nothing but a number, is not the attraction, since Ernie pumps out as much energy from his bass to drive the band as any younger man. Ernie's warmth and spirit, evident in his voice and on his face are the attraction.
Tony Nassar
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