Album of the Day 10/18/11
We’ll get caught up with this thing sooner or later – as we do pretty much every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Tuesday’s album was #470:
Howlin’ Wolf – The London Sessions
Reputedly the Wolf was hungover when he did this impromptu two-day 1970 session of remakes of many of his classic blues hits with an adoring band of British rock stars whom he’d influenced enormously. Ringo drums on one track; otherwise, the swinging rhythm section is usually Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman (whose bass work on Sittin on Top of the World is pure genius). And believe it or not, Eric Clapton stays within himself and plays the hell out of possibly the best version ever of I Ain’t Superstitious, along with Built for Comfort, Who’s Been Talking, and Red Rooster. And he leaves plenty of room to the great Hubert Sumlin, whose guitar slashes as judiciously and unpredictably as always on Rockin Daddy, Worried About My Baby, and a quick run through Do the Do. At the end, the Wolf relents and even sounds inspired on Wang Dang Doodle, a song he absolutely despised. It’s a study in contrasts: the sly, low-key Wolf and a bunch of guys getting to play with their idol, well. Here’s a random torrent.
Album of the Day 10/8/11
As we do pretty much every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Saturday’s album was #480:
Little Walter – The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection
Walter Jacobs defined blues harp. His eerie, reverb-drenched, overtone-packed lines have a signature sound that’s often imitated but never duplicated. He wasn’t a bad singer, either, with an amazing, Willie Dixon-led band behind him. This is as good a mix of his own stuff as there is out there – and don’t forget that he also played with Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf and other giants of the era as well. It’s got his big first hit, the 1955 shuffle tune My Babe, as well as hot juke-joint instrumentals like Juke, Roller Coaster, Mellow Down Easy, the jazzy Last Night and the creepy Sad Hours. There are also inspired takes on classics like Key to the Highway as well as originals like the cosmopolitan Boom Boom Out Goes the Light, the stomping, blustery Off the Wall and the tensely exuberant Just Your Fool among the 20 choice tracks here. Here’s a random torrent via KNK Music Blog.
Album of the Day 9/27/11
Pretty much every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Tuesday’s album is #491:
Magic Sam – West Side Soul
This 1967 release pretty much sums up the innovative Chicago bluesman’s career and offers more than just a cruel glimpse of where he might have gone had he lived. An energetic vocalist and talented guitarist, he very subtly and effectively brought elements of 60s soul, funk and rock into a straight-up blues format. Among blues fans, this album has iconic status, and has most of his best-known songs: That’s All I Need; the funky I Feel So Good; soulful, nocturnal versions of Otis Rush’s All Your Love and My Love Will Never Die, and B.B. King’s I Need You So Bad; a surprisingly original cover of Sweet Home Chicago; a plaintive version of J.B. Lenoir’s Mama Talk to Your Daughter; the propulsive Every Night and Every Day, the bitter I Don’t Want No Woman and the instrumental theme Lookin’ Good. Sam Maghett drank and drugged himself to death at 32. Here’s a random torrent.
Album of the Day 9/25/11
Pretty much every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Sunday’s album is #493:
Carey Bell – Live at Bellinzona Piazza Blues Festival, 1999
The trouble with studio blues recordings is that labels didn’t stop exploiting the artists after Chess went under. As a result, even as late as the 90s, so many of those albums sound forced and furtive, everybody rushing to get their parts down before time ran out. This extremely obscure lo-fi live set recorded somewhere in Italy features the great Chicago blues harpist onstage, in his element, front and center over an anonymously competent band. Bell achieves his signature spooky, swirling, hauntingly watery sound by playing through a Leslie organ speaker. The set ranges from dark and ominous with Leaving in the Morning, Broken and Hungry, and Lonesome Stranger to the sly My Eyes Keep Me In Trouble and the big party favorite When I Get Drunk, along with a characteristically volcanic version of his big instrumental crowd-pleaser Jawbreaker. Some of this is streaming at Spotify; here’s a random torrent via Renovcevic.
Album of the Day 9/16/11
Pretty much every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Friday’s album is #501:
JB Lenoir and Sunnyland Slim – Live ’63
Recorded in lo-fi mono by blues enthusiast Norman Oden at the obscure Chicago nightspot Nina’s Lounge and reissued 37 years later, this is a prime example of the blues as blue-collar neighborhood drinking music, not cultural tourism for politically correct yuppies. As The Hound has insightfully observed, Lenoir’s subtly chordal guitar style was a big influence on Ali Farka Toure, helping to jumpstart the desert blues movement. This doesn’t have Lenoir’s “protest songs” like Eisenhower Blues or Vietnam Blues, but this mostly solo set on his home turf is a treat. Pianist Sunnyland Slim – the guy who introduced Muddy Waters to Big Bill Broonzy and springboarded Waters’ career – plays with his usual casual, incisively smart style as Lenoir makes his way through the understatedly biting Harlem Can’t Be Heaven, hits like It’s You Baby and Brown Skin Woman along with a bunch of jams with titles obviously not supplied by the musicians, i.e. J.B.’s Harp-Rack Blues.The whole thing is streaming at spotify if you have it, deezer also (if you haven’t used your allotted monthly hour or whatever it is now); here’s a random torrent via The Blues-That Jazz.
Album of the Day 8/20/11
Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Saturday’s album is #528:
Memphis Minnie – I Ain’t No Bad Gal
The prototypical blues guitar goddess, Memphis Minnie’s career spanned from the delta into the Chicago era in the early 1950s. She could outplay most of the guys around her and never really got the credit she deserves. Like many blues artists of the time, she recorded for quick money, very frequently – she wrote hundreds, maybe thousands of songs. This 1998 reissue doesn’t have her signature tune When the Levee Breaks (famously covered by Led Zep), but it’s as good a representation as any. Most of the sides here date from the late 30s or early 40s. Some, like Can’t Afford to Lose My Man and You Need a Friend echo popular artists like Bessie Smith; others (Looking the World Over and Down by the Riverside) offer an update on old folk themes; but the best are her most defiant, rebellious ones like the title track, Remember Me Blues, You Got to Get Out of Here and I Am Sailing. It’s surprisingly absent from the usual sources for free music, but in lieu of this one you can check out the first volume in the “complete recorded works” collection via On Muddy Sava Riverbank.
Album of the Day 3/19/11
Here we are, to quote Muddy Waters, deep down in Florida. If any of you have ever entertained the idea of staying at one of those all-inclusive resorts run by a national hotel chain anywhere near the Disney universe, DON’T. Beyond the guilt of taking a vacation at the moment that hundreds of thousands of Japanese people are dying of radiation poisoning in a catastrophe that makes Chernobyl look like a walk in the park, this place is hell. Walking out back of the compound yesterday alongside a stinking brown cesspool dug out to simulate a real lagoon, we had to dodge the cloud of malathion casually being sprayed by a guy in a dinghy holding a fishing rod in his other hand. Maybe we should chalk this up to preparation for a post-Fukushima world. So Muddy, here’s to you. As we do every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Saturday’s album is #682:
Muddy Waters – Muddy Mississippi Waters Live
While you’re watching the unfolding disaster, we’re going to sneak a second Muddy Waters album onto this list. With this icon, the question is not which Muddy Waters albums belong here, but which ones don’t. Basically, everything this guy put out between the Alan Lomax recordings from the late 30s until the 1956 Blues and Brass album is worth owning. After that, everything up to the grossly overrated Fathers and Sons album. After that, the pickings get slim among the studio albums, although he was still an unstoppable live act. This 2003 reissue of a 1979 release mostly recorded in the early 70s features Muddy at his matter-of-fact, sly, occasionally harrowing peak of his powers as both a singer and slide guitarist, includes a second disc recorded in Indiana in the early 80s. Johnny Winter handles a lot of the solos and doesn’t embarrass himself; Luther “Guitar Jr.” Johnson takes a stinging solo on what may be the best-ever version of Baby Please Don’t Go. There’s also the slow, growling She’s Nineteen Years Old, Nine Below Zero and Deep Down in Florida along with a casually potent version of Streamline Woman and the requisite Mannish Boy. The second disc isn’t quite up to the level of the first, but it’s mostly the same band including the ageless Pinetop Perkins on piano. Here’s a random torrent via dimosblues.
Album of the Day 1/24/11
Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues, all the way to #1. Before we started that countdown, we had another one, the Best 666 Songs of All Time. You may think that we took yesterday off to watch the football game, but one of us was feverishly at work updating the links in that list (compiled over the span of a couple of years, many of them had gone dead: we’ll have the whole thing completely overhauled in the next day or so). In the meantime, Monday’s album is #736:
Lucky Peterson – Beyond Cool
The rare child prodigy who lived up to early expectations, Lucky Peterson made his debut on album at age six. By sixteen, he’d become Otis Rush’s favorite pianist. He’s also a fiery, virtuosic presence as a lead guitarist, and most recently, as a church organist. In concert, he’ll play all three instruments, often in the same song. His early albums on Rounder are perfectly decent, but his stuff from the 90s onward is absolutely brilliant (with one exception, the Lifetime album, a one-off plunge into contemporary “R&B”). This one from 1993 is characteristic: if he’s new to you, a lot of his stuff is streaming at deezer. This one’s got incisive stuff like I’m Talking To You and You Haven’t Done Nothin, more pensive but equally intense material such as Count on Me, an organ cover of Hendrix’ Up from the Skies, vintage soul-funk like Compared to What, snarling ballads like Pouring Money on a Drowning Love Affair, and the smoldering, seven-minute title track. By they time they reach a cover of Drivin’ Wheel, it’s pretty anticlimactic. The production is purist and pristine – no big-room drum sound, no slick wash of guitar effects, no cheesy synthesizers. Maybe because of all the early attention, we take this guy for granted: he’s truly one of the titans of blues. Here’s a random torrent via barin99.
Ana Popovic Burns Some Frets in Italy
What’s most striking about Serbian guitarist Ana Popovic’s new DVD An Evening at Trasimento Lake: Live from the Heart of Italy is that by the time the concert is halfway done, she hasn’t wasted any notes. That someone who plays as many of those notes, with as much abandon, would choose them so unpredictably and interestingly is pretty amazing.
From the brief interview included in the DVD’s bonus material, Popovic doesn’t like to be pinned down to one particular style. Here, it’s mostly blues and funk, but there’s also a jazzy piano ballad and a couple of catchy upbeat rock songs that sound like the early Police. She’s a star on the European concert circuit, and her big youtube hit U Complete Me (included in a particularly epic, organ-fueled version here) has won her an American fan base as well. Culled from two nights at a blues festival in an old castle in Perugia, it’s a studio-quality recording featuring her European touring band: Ronald Jonker on bass; Michele Papadia on keys; Andrew Thomas on drums; Cristiano Arcelli on tenor sax; Riccardo Giulietti on trumpet; Sandra LaVille on harmony vocals and Stephane Avellaneda on percussion. Stevie Ray Vaughan (in “on” mode, meaning the mature, drug-free SRV), is the obvious influence, guitarwise; vocally, Popovic goes for a sardonic/sarcastic style that reaches for a southern soul vibe: Jean Knight, maybe? But this is about the guitar, not the singing. All the way through the songs, there are gnats, or some kind of insect swarming the stage – an exasperated Jonker swats mightily at one at 19:50 into it – but the band don’t let the swarm stop them.
The first song, Wrong Woman (as in, “you’re messing with the wrong woman”) is a funk song. Papadia pitches in with a wink and grin on the lower registers of the clavinova, Sly Stone style, a feel that will recur again as Popovic snarls and burns through the passing tones, relentlessly yet judiciously. It’s counterintuitive, to say the least, and it’s breathtaking. Then she does the same with Is This Everything There Is, a rock song with more than a slight resemblance to Message in a Bottle.
Unlike a lot of other lead guitar stars, she’s proves not afraid of the lower registers on a growling version of the slide boogie blues How’d You Learn to Shake It Like That (lyrics are not usually her strong suit). The brisk soul shuffle Nothing Personal introduces the horns, with a tight, vicious guitar solo paired off against Papadia’s gritty clavinova again.
Shadow After Dark has Popovic blending Andy Summers spaciousness with David Gilmour rage, then they hit a plateau of sorts with another funk song and the most trad moment here, the bouncy blues Let Me Love You Babe. Popovic takes a break on the torchy piano ballad Doubt Everyone But Me, tosses off a pointless acoustic pop song but then regroups with a couple of strong, riff-driven numbers featuring swirling organ and more terse, incisive guitar fills. They bring it up all the way with a brisk, reworked version of The Fever, Popovic taking it to redline with casually vicious precision. The DVD ends with the night’s one semi-political number, Hold On, another funk song. Taken as a whole, much of this is a rare treat for guitar fans. Unfortunately, whoever did the cinematography must not be a guitarist: all too frequently, the camera cuts away from Popovic right as she’s about to do something exquisite. Did someone not tell him/her, it’s the fingers on the fretboard, not the picking, that every player wants to see? And the bonus acoustic tracks are strangely pastiched together and don’t add much of anything other than proving Popovic just effortlessly fast and impactful at open-tuned delta blues as she is with electric styles. It’s out now on Artist Exclusive.
Album of the Day 10/17/10
Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Sunday’s album is #835:
The Essential Sonny Boy Williamson
Famously covered by the Stones, Van Morrison and the Yardbirds (whose live album with him is a complete trainwreck), Sonny Boy Williamson’s sly, often leering vocals and somewhat unhinged playing have made him an icon among blues fans. The great blues harpist, songwriter and showman was, like every bluesman of his era, a singles artist. For that reason, we picked this 1993 compilation from among the dozens of out there, many of them bootlegs, since it has the most tracks. 45 in all, recorded with a Hall of Fame list of Chess stars: drummer Fred Below, bassist/producer Willie Dixon, guitarist Muddy Waters, pianist Lafayette Leake and too many others to name. To blues scholars, this guy, Alec “Rice” Miller was Sonny Boy Williamson #2, to differentiate him from the first, John Lee Williamson, who was younger and whom #2 outlived by over a dozen years. From his days hustling on the chitlin and party circuit and then emceeing the King Biscuit Flour Hour,Williamson #2 developed a rakish persona to go along with a voracious appetite for alcohol and a knack for an aphoristic turn of phrase that fueled a succession of hit singles in the 50s. The best-known one, if not his best one, is One Way Out, butchered by the Allman Brothers to the point of being almost unrecognizable. Others you may recognize here are Fattening Frogs for Snakes, Your Funeral and My Trial, Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide, Nine Below Zero, Don’t Start Me to Talking and Keep It To Yourself. Some of the other tracks here are ephemeral but virtually all of them are choice. Pretty much anything did during the 50s is worth hearing, if you’re into this stuff: by the 60s, he was pretty much running on (alcohol) fumes. Here’s a random torrent.
Lucid Culture 