Folk to Blues

A big thank you goes to my daughter Caitlin for creating the image above.

Folk music, in its broadest definition, is music that is handed down within a given tradition. This can apply to Tuvan throat-singing, Mexican polkas, or even English murder ballads. Or to the blues. Indeed, many American folk singers include blues songs in their repertoires, and some show the influence of it in everything they do. Still, there is a qualitative difference between a folk artist performing a blues song and the performance of a blues musician. To me, the difference is the approach to the song. A folk artist emphasizes the song in their performance. The lyrics are clear, and the playing likewise. This can be done in an emotional way, and I thoroughly enjoy these kinds of performances. But a blues artist takes a song, any song, and focuses on the emotion of the piece. The performance is raw, with everything out in the open. Subtlety comes from the shades of emotion in a performance, in conveying a glimmer of hope amidst the sorrow, or love amidst the anger.

The above makes it sound like there is a sharp line between a folk performance and a blues one. But life is rarely so neat, and so it is here as well. There are degrees of “folkness” and “bluesness” in the performance styles of most artists who plow the ground where the two meet. Let’s meet some of these artists, and I’ll show you what I mean.

Ernest Troost: Real Music

[purchase]

Ernest Troost was a New Folk winner at Kerrville a while back. He plays acoustic guitar, and his playing style shows that he knows well the styles of the great pre-war blues masters. As a writer, Troost’s work is informed by the blues, but not bound by it. His approach to vocals is folk all the way. His words are important, and he is emotionally invested, but he’s keeping some for himself as well. Live at McCabe’s presents a selection of Troost’s songs from his three studio albums to date. The show begins with just Troost and his guitar, and the band members join him one by one. So some of the songs are presented in sparer arrangements than the studio versions, while others have a fuller arrangement than before. Over all, Live at McCabe’s is a great introduction to the bluesy folk of Ernest Troost. He is new to me, but I will be keeping an eye on him from now on.

Grant Dermody: First Light

[purchase]

Thank you, Marco Prozzo, for the cover image. You can see more of Prozzo‘s work here.

Two of the best know acts working this ground between folk and blues would be Eric Bibb, from the folk side, and the duo of John Cephus and Phil Wiggins, from the blues side. Grant Dermody has worked extensively with both. His album Lay Down My Burden has liner notes by Phil Wiggins, and Eric Bibb plays on several songs. Dermody is a singer and Harmonica player, and he has the Piedmont blues style down. Dermody also knows how to write in this style. And his choices of covers include many of the old masters. But Lay Down My Burden closes with a Tibetan chant, and the album also includes a wonderful version of Amazing Grace. Dermody is also a creative arranger. A couple of songs here feature just two harmonicas and voice, and other songs have a four piece band, but with mandolin where you would expect a guitar. So First Light is solidly in the blues tradition, and a Dermody original, but elsewhere, Dermody explores the boundaries of the blues, and sometimes steps outside of them. Over all, he shows himself to be a confident musical explorer. He is also a generous band leader, sometimes stepping back and giving the lead vocals to someone else. If you buy only one album from this post, it should probably be this one, because Dermody most eloquently sums up the theme of this post in his album, and it is a thrilling trip.

Mary Flower: I‘m Dreaming of Your Demise

[purchase]

Mary Flower is here for a couple of reasons. She likes to open her songs with just her guitar, before adding her voice and a second instrument, and those guitar intros are pure blues playing. Also, I’m Dreaming of Your Demise add the piano of Dave Frishberg, so the song makes a good bridge to the piano blues in the rest of this post. But Mary Flower’s singing is a wildcard here. This is neither a folk nor a blues approach to the song. Instead, Flower is a jazz singer. Dreaming is a song sung by a wronged lover seeking revenge, but it is even more chilling because it is delivered with a wink and a smile. The structure of the song, with its extended lines in the vocal part, also place it in the jazz tradition But Flower’s playing is blues all the way. The best measure of her enormous talent is that she makes this combination sound completely natural, even though I’ve never heard anyone do it before.

Big Joe Duskin: Get Out of My Way

[purchase]

Big Joe Duskin was a throw-back. Born in 1921, Duskin began performing before World War II, playing piano in the classic boogie woogie style, and singing in a manner that is pure blues. However, Duskin did not make his first album until 1978. By then, he was living representative from another world, that of pre-war blues. Duskin died in 2007, and Big Joe Jumps Again! Was made three years before that. In all, Duskin only made three studio albums and two hard-to-find live ones. Boogie woogie is usually thought of as fast music, but I chose Get Out of My Way to show how Duskin could burn up a slow number as well. I love the ornamentation, played mostly in the right hand, that changes from verse to verse. Duskin’s voice had to have been stronger when he was younger, but all of the emotion this song needs is there. I can imagine the then 83-year-old Duskin shouting to the drummer and bass player on these sessions, “Try to keep up!”.

Eden Brent: Ain‘t Got No Troubles

[purchase]

If you haven’t listened to Ain’t Got No Troubles yet, hold off for just a second. Forget that this is a blues post, and look at the picture of the woman on the album cover shown above. Try to imagine what her voice must sound like. Got it? OK, now listen. Wow! Where did that come from? Eden Brent is an old fashioned blues belter, and a fine one. She is also a New Orleans blues pianist in the tradition of Professor Longhair and Dr John. That said, she has a wonderful light touch on her solos, dancing across the keys while never losing the backbeat. She is surrounded by a great band, including George Porter Jr of The Meters. Some people may think of the blues as depressing music, but this album is a fine example of how exciting this music can be, and why such a wide variety of artists are drawn to it.

Looking Back

There are times in a musician’s career when they take a moment to reflect on the past. Joni Mitchell twice summed up phases of her career with live albums, before making her next bold leap. A greatest hits or “best of” album can be a contractual obligation at times, but sometimes it can be an artist taking stock of their work to date. And a reissue, especially if it comes with extras, can allow an artist to revisit a moment in time, and sometimes even fix mistakes. Recently, enough albums like this have come my way to make a post, and here it is. When I set out to do this post, I neglected to take into account that albums like this often have generous amounts of music on them. So, where most of the albums I deal with have just over a half hour of music, four of the albums heard here are over an hour long each; that’s why this post is so late, and I would like to thank my regular readers for your patience. Consumer warning: three or four of the artists in this post, depending on your musical taste, make musical sense together, but then things go off the rails. All of these artists are here because I really enjoy their work. I hope you will keep an open mind, and enjoy them too.

Slaid Cleaves: Broke Down

[purchase]

Slaid Cleaves’ album Sorrow & Smoke is not only a look back, but also a homecoming. The Horseshoe Lounge in Austin Texas is where Cleaves made his breakthrough. At a pair of shows there last year, Cleaves played many of the songs from his breakthrough album Broke Down, including the song Horseshoe Lounge. Music from three other albums is included here, as well as some choice covers of other Texas songwriters. On his studio albums, Cleaves is usually accompanied by a full band, but here he has just another guitar player and a keyboard player with him. The keyboard is usually either a piano or the accordion heard here. So the songs are presented here in an intimate setting, and Cleaves’ talents as a singer and songwriter shine through. I chose the song Broke Down as much for the fact that it was the title track of Cleaves’ breakthrough album as anything else. The quality of the music is remarkably consistent over the length of Sorrow & Smoke.

Guy Clark: The Cape

[purchase]

On Songs and Stories, Guy Clark looks over his career with the help of his full band. The “Stories” in the album title are mainly song introductions, but the songs are more than enough to make up for that. Some of the older songs here got a country treatment in their original studio versions, but now the arrangements are more on the folk side of things, and the songs are better for it. Guy Clark turned 70 this year, and you can hear his age in his voice. But he takes the gravelly sound he makes now, and makes use of it. The Cape is one of many songs here that sound different when sung with the voice of experience. It says a lot about Clark’s strength as a writer that his age has caught up to his material, but he was able to write these songs when he was so much younger. Wisdom, warmth, and humor all come through wonderfully. Clark is a generous host, letting his bandmates Verlon Thompson and Shawn Camp take the lead on two songs each. Overall, Songs and Stories is an album that leaves me feeling that I have spent just over an hour in some very good company.

Paul Geremia: Lovin‘ Sam (The Sheik of Alabam‘)

[purchase]

For Love My Stuff, Paul Geremia went through recordings of his live performances throughout his career, and compiled an album from them. This is a generous sampling of 18 songs, most of which have never been on an album before in either a live or a studio version. Geremia is an old style blues artist. Before World War II, most blues artists lived and worked in the American South. The music was acoustic. In blues, musicians do what is called bending notes, which is sliding a note sharp or flat for emotional effect. Those old blues players would bend time the same way, stretching or compressing a musical phrase. To modern ears, this can sound sloppy or like a mistake, but it is done on purpose, and it is a powerful technique once you know what you are listening to. Paul Geremia is the only modern blues artist I have heard who plays this way, and he does it very well indeed. Geremia applies this technique to folk blues and to jazzier numbers as well, and either way, it works beautifully.

[purchase Persuasions of the Dead]

Sometimes, there are second chances. In 1999, The Persuasions went into the studio and recorded the tracks for their album Might as Well. This was a set of songs that the Grateful Dead had become known for, so it might have seemed to be an odd project for the legendary a capella group. But the Persuasions had previously done an album of Frank Zappa songs, and they were never afraid to add unusual songs to their repertoire. Normally, The Persuasions took pride in the rich sounds they made with just human voices, but Might as Well had guest musicians, including not only more voices but also instrumentalists too. Producer Rip Rense was never quite satisfied with the resulting album, but group leader Jerry Lawson left the group in 2003, and that seemed to be that.
Fast forward all the way to this year. Somehow, Rense managed to reconvene the entire group, including Lawson, and create a new version of the album. It has a new name, given by Tom Waits: Persuasions of the Dead. The new name is warranted, because the album has been resequenced, with songs that never made it onto the original album. Some of the original instrumental parts have been toned down, but there are also entirely new instrumental parts, some by musicians who were not even part of the earlier sessions. The Persuasions and the other singers on the album have redone some of their parts, and the whole thing has been remastered. The results sound glorious. With all that goes on here, the album shines the spotlights in the two places they belong: the singing sounds full and rich, and the quality of the songs shines through.

Sadly, I do not have permission to share songs from Persuasions of the Dead with you. The same thing happened when I reviewed the last Persuasions release, Live at McCabe‘s Guitar Shop. Happily, I do have to permission now to share some of that music, so here it is. You can buy Live at McCabe’s at the link below, but there is also a combo deal on the site for Persuasions of the Dead, if you would like to buy both albums together.

The Persuasions: Peace in the Valley

The Persuasions: Under the Boardwalk

[purchase Live at McCabe‘s]

Ljova: Midnight Oil Change

[purchase]

What have we here? Midnight Oil Change opens with the most haunted accordion part you may ever hear, just two chords alternating, like the beating of the Tell-Tale Heart in its effect.. That is soon joined by an electric guitar. The third instrument you hear is a viola being plucked. For lack of a better term, and taking the album this comes from as a whole, this would be considered classical music. The composer and violist is Ljova. It isn’t too hard for me to imagine a more conventional orchestration for Midnight Oil Change, especially once the strings and brasses enter. But Ljova isn’t about conventional. Lost in Kino is a collection of music Ljova wrote and recorded for films during the years 2006 to 2011. Most of these are what might be called “deep independent films”, the sort you would have to dig to find. They include short films, animation, and documentaries. I doubt that many of them had soundtrack albums. So Ljova wanted to preserve this music, but also focus on pieces that would work without their visual context. The songs in the first half of the album were recorded with the gypsy band Romashka, who I need to find out more about. Much of the second half is Ljova playing multiple parts on the viola and the famiola, (like a viola, only with six strings where the viola has only four). Throughout the album, Ljova draws on folk music, mostly from eastern Europe, but also from Apalachia for one track, and China for another. The result is a wonderful document of Ljova’s work for film, but also an album of music that really works beautifully as a whole, and out of context. There is much here for the more adventurous fans of folk music to enjoy, and Lost in Kino is also a fine continuation of a classical music tradition of composers including folk melodies and motifs in their work.

Based on Blues

The image above is the work of artist Kenneth Anderson. Learn more about him, and see more of his work here.

Blues is foundational music. What I mean by that is that the music itself developed in several directions, but along the way, artists in other genres took inspiration from it, and made something new. Sometimes, it was a new kind of blues. Other times, it was a new musical genre. The five songs in this post represent snapshots of different points in this process. Some of these artists are certainly blues artists, while others are simply drinking from the deep well that is the blues.

Big Jim Adam and John Stilwagen: Work Til the Sun Goes down

[purchase]

The music of Big Jim Adam and John Stilwagen is a survey of blues styles from country blues from prior to World War II to Chicago blues as it sounded in the 1950s. But these songs are not just museum pieces; Adam and Stilwagen invest each with the immediacy and emotion that great blues demands. Work Til the Sun Goes Down is an original song, just written a year ago. But, there is a type of blues, one of the earliest forms, known as work songs or field hollers. These were rhythmic songs, sung by field laborers a capella, that accompanied tasks like the hoeing heard here or the chain gangs swinging their hammers. Work Til the Sun Goes Down sounds like it might once have been a field holler, and Adam and Stilwagen have given it a haunting instrumental backing that works perfectly.

Danielle Miraglia: See the Light

[purchase]

Danielle Miraglia is a wonderful singer-songwriter. Blues is one of many ingredients in her work, and its presence is subtle. You can hear it in how she approaches her vocals, with moans and growls mixed in with the sweetness. See the Light also has some wonderful, although brief, blues licks on the banjo towards the end of the song. Some of her other songs, obviously including her version of Stagger Lee, are bluesier than this. But See the Light is a perfect example of how the blues mixes with other musical forms, and, like this entire album, it is also a fine performance.

Scott Ramminger with Mary Ann Redmond: There Must Be Something Wrong With You

[purchase]

Scott Ramminger’s songs come from the place where Chicago blues began to morph into early rock and roll. He also mixes in a healthy dose of New Orleans spirit. And there are even hints of country on a couple of songs. But there is never any mistaking the fact that Ramminger is a bluesman first, and a fine one. There Must Be Something Wrong With You is a slow burner, a passionate blues ballad. Mary Ann Redmond is his duet partner here, and their voices mesh perfectly. Ramminger is a sax player, so the horn parts here and elsewhere on the album are an extra treat.

Gina Sicilia: Members Only

[purchase]

I have stated elsewhere that the music that is called R&B these days has had all of the blues stripped out of it. R&B originally stood for Rhythm and Blues, and Gina Sicilia restores the connection between the two. You can call Sicilia a belter, but only if you admit that Aretha Franklin was too. Both singers raise their voices when their emotions swell, but neither does it for show. Lyrically, Members Only is a rhythm and blues song, but the vocal is well within the passionate tradition of blues shouters. Some of the other songs here are even more in the rhythm and blues category, but the vocals come straight from the blues.

The Jeff Golub Band: I‘m Tore Down

[purchase]

In his day job, as it were, Jeff Golub is a fusion jazz guitarist, somewhat in the mold of George Benson. But the album The Three Kings is something different: a tribute, with vocals on most tracks, to BB, Albert, and Freddie King. Golub hands the vocal off to others, and focuses on leading the band. This is electric blues with horns. The band is both tight and loose, in all the right ways. The songs feel like honest outpourings of emotion, with the band providing a solid frame for brief, but spontaneous-sounding solos. It’s powerful stuff, as the blues should be, and I’m Tore Down is a fine example.

Where the Blues Takes You

The Blues. Those two words conjure a particular sound. Like so many kinds of music, you can hear it in your head, but you may not be able to define it. But try this: get together with a group of people to discuss it. You might get a surprise. You might find that not everyone hears the same music in their head that you do. You see, the blues is not a static form. It has changed over time, and that process is still going on. The earliest blues is almost unrecognizable to most people. And some artists who started with the blues are now making music that strains that definition. Here are five songs to show what I mean. That’s not nearly enough, so, as a survey, this is very incomplete. But I think it is a fair starting point. The music here, stylistically, spans about fifty years of music. But these are all contemporary artists, and these albums have come out within the last year. Nevertheless, taken together, they take us on a long journey through the blues. Walk with me.

The Little Brothers: Crow Jane

[purchase]

The blues comes from Africa, and then arrives by force in the United States, where it is influenced by Western music to some extent. By the time it started to be recorded, there were black string bands throughout the American South. In addition to the familiar guitars, there were fiddles, banjos, and mandolins. This is the music that inspires The Little Brothers. Their version of Crow Jane has a raw sound that is a perfect reflection of these early blues songs. The musical phrases are longer than you hear in newer blues, and time can expand and contract in this music. Listen to the early recordings that Lightnin’ Hopkins made as a solo artist, and you will hear where this music went. The Little Brothers are a trio, with fine male and female singers. They preserve this early blues sound, but they do not sound like scholars or preservationists. They invest this music with all of the passion it ever had.

Pete Anderson: One and Only Lonely Fool

[purchase]

Pete Anderson first came to my attention as Dwight Yoakum’s first producer. So this album really took me by surprise. The songs on Even Things Up are soaked in blues, and the styles range from the jump blues heard here to Rhythm and Blues and Southern rock. Anderson wrote or co-wrote all of the songs, and it all cooks. Actually, One and Only Lonely Fool isn’t quite jump blues. In the 1930s, many of the big bands had singers, including blues singers like Jimmy Rushing. As these bands began to shrink, the singers stayed on in some cases, and a blues/ jazz hybrid called jump blues developed. First T-Bone Walker and then B B King took this music and began to emphasize the electric guitar in the arrangements, with stinging lead lines to cut through the cushion of horns. This is where One and Only Lonely Fool fits in. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how the music went from here to James Brown.

John Primer: Chicago Bound

[purchase]

The pivot point for blues is Chicago in the 1950s. The tale of how Southern blues artists like Muddy Waters came to Chicago and plugged in their guitars is well known. On The (R)evolution Continues, the people who run Raisin’ Records have brought together a fine roster of artists with deep roots in the Chicago blues scene to present a survey of the rise and development of Chicago blues. The album is actually the second in a series called Chicago Blues A Living History. This one includes a booklet that gives the year each song was written, and places it in the context of the development of the Chicago sound. It’s a beautiful package, and a great place to start any exploration of this music. Of course, the most important thing is that the music is great.

John Primer is not the best known artist on this album, (that would be Buddy Guy or James Cotton), but his performance of Chicago Bound is a high point, and the song fits this post perfectly. The song is a Jimmy Rogers tune from 1954. He recorded it shortly after leaving Muddy Waters’ band. The interplay of the guitar and piano and the feel of the rhythm section are hallmarks of the Chicago sound. So is the harmonica sound on the solo.

Peaches Staten: I Know You Love Me Baby

[purchase]

After the 1950s, some Chicago artists began to adapt to Rhythm and Blues. Blues is still very much part of the sound, but there is a gospel influence in the big voices, and this is music for dancing. Peaches Staten is a modern Chicago artist who shows how this played out. Her album Live at Legends has bluesier numbers and others that are more soul music. There is even one zydeco number, where she plays the washboard. Through it all, her voice growls and purrs, and there is never any question of how she is feeling. I Know You Love Me finds a stylistic balance. The song opens with a funk line in the guitar that is soon joined by the drums and bass. But the harmonica and Staten’s voice on this one are pure blues. The overall sound of this album is what modern blues sounds like in one of its guises. It’s a long way from The Little Brothers, but the passion is still there.

Tom Principato: Don‘t Wanna Do It

[purchase]

In the 1960s, white musicians began to discover the blues. Notable examples from England included John Mayall and his bands, and the Rolling Stones. A little later, American rockers like the Allman Brothers began to follow suit. From their beginnings as actual blues bands, these artists became rockers who used blues as an important ingredient in their music, and blues-rock was born. The guitar gods like Eric Clapton come from this period. Tom Principato began making his own blues-rock in the 70s, and he’s still at it. Without the context of this post, most people would probably call Don’t Wanna Do It southern rock, and that would be fair. Chuck Leavell from the Allman Brothers even plays the organ here. But now I hope you can hear the blues in this music as well. Elsewhere on this album, there are a couple of Latin-tinged songs. Keep in mind that Carlos Santana started out as a blues guitarist, and that Black Magic Woman was written by Peter Green shortly after he left John Mayall’s band. So overall, Principato delivers a tour of where blues rock has gone. A couple of instrumentals also have a delicious jazzy flavor to them. And Principato, in both his singing and playing, delivers all of the passion of a bluesman.

Mikel Rouse - Corner Loading volume 1

[purchase]

Let’s talk about the blues for a moment. Before World War II, many blues musicians played guitar and sang, maybe they accompanied themselves with a harmonica, and that was it. Blues was a musical form that was still taking shape. The conventional 12-bar structure we know today had not yet taken hold, so these old-time blues players were free to manipulate time in their songs. Lightning Hopkins, for one, used to add or subtract measures, stretching or condensing time as the mood struck him, but in a way he always controlled. Also, there were blues songs that had numbers of bars, or even time signatures, that just wouldn’t make sense to today’s blues audience. Think also about John Lee Hooker. Most of his music was made after the war, and he mostly used the 12-bar structure. Hooker would play intricate patterns on the guitar, but a pattern would go on unchanging for the length of a song, without even a key change. In the hands of many artists, this would be deadly dull to listen to, but Hooker makes the repetition insistent and powerful.

Mikel Rouse shows, on his album Corner Loading Volume 1, that he knows this history, and that he has the skill to apply it in his own work. On two songs, Rouse accompanies himself only with handclaps in unusual rhythms. For the rest, It’s just Rouse and his guitar, plus harmonica on two songs. Unlike any of the music I featured in my last post, all of these songs could be recorded in one take, with no overdubs. And here we learn that Mikel Rouse is a great guitar player. He creates intricate patterns and plays in a rhythmic style that frees him from the need of a band. So Corner Loading can be considered to be his first solo album. (Technically, as I discussed last time, that would Quorum, but Corner Loading is the first album I have heard from Rouse that would require neither a dance troupe nor other musicians to perform live). The rhythmic experimentation of the early blues artists is here, and so is the insistent power found in John Lee Hooker’s music. Years is one song that sounds more like early jazz to me, with its clustered notes making unusual close harmonies.

The lyrics are another matter. Rouse is not one to tell his own story, as blues musicians do. Rouse can filter someone else’s story through his own perceptions, or he can create a character and tell his story in a long form work. But Rouse is usually looking at a bigger picture, even in these cases. Corner Loading is not a long-form work, but simply a collection of songs. So here, Rouse is not telling a story at all. Even so, these songs are heartfelt. Beginning with Active Denial, and ending with Ad Man, Rouse is commenting on the state of the world. He is interested in how people are able to deceive themselves, or be deceived, so that they can pursue their self-interest, and somehow not see the pain of others. Lonesome Shoeshine has wealthy and powerful men wondering why the man who used to shine their shoes cannot now find work. The chorus is a single line, and the only mention of the title character, but it gives the song all of its power. Made Up, Oh Lord is the lyric that is closest to the blues in the lyric. The song is a prayer and a cry of pain, and Rouse’s performance really puts it over. There are two songs that have minimal lyrics, and they are together on the album. The only words to Be Real Bad are, “ You know I ain’t gonna be real bad ,” sung over several times. This has a certain hypnotic power, but I could see someone adding additional lyrics for a cover version, and that could really work, because Be Real Bad does have a great melody. The lyrics of Trouble Making are slightly less skeletal, but the shifts in musical mood are what make this one work. Elsewhere on the album, Rouse shows himself to be an economical but eloquent lyricist.

The last piece of the puzzle on Corner Loading is Mikel Rouse’s voice. This is an album that Rouse could not have made when he was younger. His voice used to be high and smooth, and that would not have worked. But now, Rouse’s voice has deepened somewhat, and it now has a gravelly quality, and that is what this album needs. Rouse sing s these songs in his weathered voice, but with great emotion. The title of the album implies that there will someday be a volume 2. Rouse’s career indicates that there may be several fascinating detours before that happens. Either way, I will be looking forward to seeing what he does next.

Mikel Rouse: Years

Mikel Rouse: Lonesome Shoeshine

Swississippi Chris Harper - Four Aces and a Harp

[Available September 21, 2010; preorder here]

There is a brand new blues label in Chicago, called Swississippi Records. Their first three releases come out on September 21, and they are Rob Blaine's Big Otis Blues, Peaches Staten's Live at Legends, and Chris Harper's Four Aces and a Harp. The first two are different takes on what has become of blues music these days. The Blaine album is a blues and rock hybrid, while the Staten album presents a powerful soul shouter who reminds us that the B in R&B stands for blues. But I am a traditionalist when it comes to blues. I love the acoustic blues that predated World War II, and those who keep that sound alive. I also love the parallel development of jump blues, which is where jazz gets its blues flavors from. Finally, pure blues, for me, reached its peak with the Chicago sound of the 1950s. So the prize in this first batch of Swississippi releases is Four Aces and a Harp by Chris Harper.

This is actually a very unusual project. Usually, a blues album in a single artist’s name is a showcase for their playing and singing. True, Harper plays harmonica on all tracks here, but he sometimes plays a supporting role, depending on what the song needs. And Harper sings on only five of the album’s 18 tracks. Two other singers take five songs each, and still two more take one each. (If you’re counting, that’s 17; there is one instrumental.) So I wouldn’t call Harper the leader here. Rather, he and co-producer Dave Katzman are the hosts. You see, Harper and Katzman set out to gather together as many Chicago bluesmen as they could find, and record an album that presented the traditional sounds of Chicago blues, as well as earlier blues styles that influenced the Chicago sound. So there are 17 musicians on this album, playing in various configurations. For the electric numbers, there are drums, bass, guitar, and of course harmonica. Sometimes they are joined by slide guitar or piano. A couple of songs also have washboard. The acoustic numbers have drums, stand-up bass, acoustic guitar, and harmonica. I’ve never heard an acoustic ensemble like that playing blues, but it sounds great.

The danger in a project like this is that it could come out sounding like a museum piece, with classic tunes slavishly recreated in their best known arrangements. But Harper and company are presenting this music as a living tradition. The arrangements on Four Aces and a Harp are new, but belong within the tradition of Chicago blues. “Arrangements” may not even be the right term; this album has the feel of a group of very talented friends getting together and jamming on the music they love best. Also, the song selection helps make this one sound fresh. There are songs here that were originally done by Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, and so forth. But these are not their best known songs, which gives Harper and Co more leeway to make the songs their own.

Two songs, Blues is My Life and You Make Me Fly, are Harper originals. From these, it is clear that he brings a strong jazz flavor to the proceedings. Blues is My Life, in particular, is a song I would love to hear with a horn section. The instrumental song on the album is Don’t Get Around Much Anymore, probably also a Harper selection. And these all swing. Just a few of the highlights among the electric numbers are Evil is Going On, Long Distance Call, and What’s Wrong. But the acoustic numbers are the ones that really knocked me out. I Smell Trouble is a ballad, and a song I knew I would post the first time I heard it. The song is a cry, and it is completely convincing. Born in Arkansas is a more uptempo number, and it also completely works for me. The album also has fine versions of Down in the Bottom, Next Time You See Me, and Worried Life Blues.

One of the pleasures of this album is the sense of comraderie that comes through in the performances. Many of the songs have instrumental lines that intertwine, and there is also great interplay between the singers and the instrumentalists. Sometimes the guitar and piano, or guitar and harmonica, seem to have a conversation. The drums and bass provide a solid rhythmic foundation, but they also add in these little asides here and there. It sounds like the musicians were having a great time, and the resulting music is very exciting.

All told, Four Aces and a Harp is seventy-two minutes of music, spread over 18 songs. It doesn’t seem nearly that long. Maybe, there are another 18 songs left over from these sessions. If so, I’m ready to listen to them right now. It would be my pleasure.

Swississippi Chris Harper: I Smell Trouble

Swississippi Chris Harper: Born in Arkansas