It’s ironic that two ex-bandmates from Austin’s Fabulous Thunderbirds would have overlapping new CDs. Of course, here, Wilson headed up his band on harp and vocals and ex-T-bird six-string Jimmie Vaughan just dropped a new CD too. It’s ironic here that Wilson touts that
The Big Tone Sessions was recorded on analog tape just like “the classic music from labels like Chess.” Actually, a lot of the “classic” blues was actually cut direct to disc, but that would be a step too far. No matter, Wilson gets a fat, upfront harp sound a la Little Walter with, as it should be, mostly sparse accompaniment. Wilson liberally picks over the Chess catalog (four Jimmy Rogers originals) as he attempts to emulate the same Chicago sound that came out of that primitive studio on South Cottage Grove. Covers in the mix include a hip version of Jimmy Nolen’s “You’ve Been Goofing,” but re-doing Larry Williams’ “Slow Down” doesn’t translate well. Interspersed with several Wilson
Bluesology: Ghalia Volt s One Woman Band, Mick Kolassa, Sugar Ray and more
Mike Greenblatt s monthly Bluesology column inspects the recent notes of Ghalia Volt s One Woman Band, Mick Kolassa, Sugar Ray and more.
Author:
Any new
Mick Kolassa album is cause for celebration. This longtime champion of the blues helped The Blues Foundation become a guiding force in this music and, indeed, 100% of the proceeds from the sale of
If You Can’t Be Good, Be Good At It (on his own Endless Blues Records) helps support that effort. And what an album! Give Jeff Jensen some credit here. The leader of his own band has settled into a groove with Kolassa over the latter’s last few album and here his guitar shrieks split the black night like lightning. Whether it’s Howling Wolf (“Who’s Been Talking”) or even James Taylor (“Lo And Behold”), the Kolassa/Jensen production gives the attention-to-detail highs priority while not sacrificing the big bass bottom. Kolassa’s voice has neve
I can’t hit the page without hearing Hendrix, his psychedelically bluesed guitar journeys I bathed in for at least an hour every day for four or five years of my early twenties until I’d memorized every solo, him fingering feedback and folding wah wah into sonic ambulances of soul. I can’t hit the page without the echo of Muddy Waters’s Mississippi guitar that found its way to an electrified Chicago, without hearing the “I’m a Man” foundational blocks with his legendary harmonica men Little Walter, Carey Bell, James Cotton, Junior Wells, Big Walter Horton, George Smith. I hear their tremolo and bravado, the shuffles, train tracks and galactic howls seeping from their mouths through reeds and between their fingers, and I ache to bring it to the page I bleed to breathe it into stanzas. I can’t hit the page without Yusef Lateef and John Lee Hooker and Curtis Mayfield blazing across the chorus. I can’t hit the page without Prince on stage at the Super Bowl strutting
Every once in a while HBO will slip something strange into the lineup of shows on which it stakes its fortune your “Game of Thrones,” your “Undoing.” Something arty for art’s sake, something odd for oddity’s sake, like Terence Nance’s “Random Acts of Flyness” or “How To with John Wilson.” They may not bring in large audiences, or dominate the chatter on social media, or prompt multiple stories in the press, but for my money, these unpredictable exceptions represent the channel at its most worthwhile.
Such is John Lurie’s “Painting With John,” an idiosyncratic bagatelle whose second episode (of six) premieres Friday. First known as a musician and an actor, pursuits he was forced to abandon by the Lyme disease that still troubles him, Lurie turned to painting, and this new series, whose title calls back to his 1991 IFC/Bravo series “Fishing With John,” finds him making pictures and telling stories on the unnamed, tropical “tiny island” he calls ho
The Aces helped invent the sound of electric Chicago blues
They’re best known as a backing band for Junior Wells and Little Walter, but they took the lead when it came to the future of the genre.
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Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
When you delve into the history of Chicago blues, you hear a lot about singers, lead guitarists, and harmonica players. But what about rhythm sections? Surely the groove keepers are just as indispensable and just as responsible for advances in the music. Such is the case with the Aces, who are as important to electric urban blues as the Funk Brothers are to Motown s polished pop R&B. When the Great Migration carried Mississippi Delta blues to Chicago in the 1940s, it evolved into the citified postwar sound that s still familiar to l