By Chris M. Slawecki
In music as in life, several basic, universal, and unalterable truths can only be told in the colors of the blues. Whether you're in the dust bowl, the cotton belt, or a modern urban jungle, wherever and whenever the blues finds you, the blues is still the blues.
Billie Holiday: Blue Billie (Sony/Legacy)
Recordings of "Lady Day" moanin' a traditional eight- or twelve-bar blues are few and far between. Yet no one who's ever heard Holiday's cathartic "God Bless the Child" or "Strange Fruit" would doubt that Holiday was an expert blues impressionist who worked out the profound feeling of the blues even if she rarely worked in its form.
Blue Billie compiles more than a dozen somber selections that Holiday recorded between 1935 and '42 with her own orchestra, with her longtime pianist Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra, and with an all-star orchestra led by Benny Carter. Their instrumentation is dark and subdued, nearly funereal, providing almost no rhythmic movement but delivering static and soft harmonization with Holiday's voice as it crumples and flattens popular melodies into the blues. Though several selections feature saxophonist Lester Young, one of Holiday's most famous and sympathetic accompanists, as part of her orchestra, trumpet serves as her main foil here, with Roy Eldridge providing brassy and blue counterpoint in "Body and Soul" and with Hot Lips Page wailing at the end of "Long Gone Blues" like the whistle of a train that's taking your baby away one more time, for good.
Like a musical alchemist, Holiday transforms lyrics such as "Angels have no thought of ever returning you/ Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?" from the opening "Gloomy Sunday" into serious as a heart attack blues. Her phrasing behind "I wonder why it's me you're wronging" in "Body and Soul" simply sounds so damn forlorn and lonesome that you want to somehow tell her that everything will someday be all right.
Melvin Taylor & The Slack Band: Rendezvous with the Blues (Evidence)
The set list comprising this Rendezvous demonstrates the bountifully diverse influences that can be heaped upon the back of a modern blues guitarist / vocalist such as Taylor: "Comin' Home Baby" opens the set in honor of the buzzsaw version that opens Herbie Mann's Live at the Village Gate album; "Black Queen" was an acoustic blues on the first Stephen Stills solo album; "Five Women" is by Prince; the title track is an old Wet Willie tune; "I'm the Man Down There" was penned by Jimmy Reed, and "Help Me" by Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson and Ralph Bass; Mato Nanji, guitarist for the band Indigenous, guests on Taylor's "Tribute to John Lee Hooker," a medley of "Chill Out" and "The Healer"; and "Blue Jean Blues" is an underrated modern blues classic by "that li'l old band from Texas," ZZ Top.
This is also a return Rendezvous for Taylor with bluesman Lucky Peterson, who contributes his own guitar, Hammond B-3, and keyboards; the two previously toured Europe then recorded together in 1984.
Jazz makes the first impression, in the tone and tone and chord placement from Taylor's guitar in the opening tune, which suggests the sound of a Wes Montgomery session with Booker T. & The MGs. Montgomery casts a large shadow over "Help Me" and one might even say he also…uh, eclipses "Eclipse" ("Eclipse" even slips and dips softly into George Benson territory). "Help Me," with its keyboard funk and swamp rhythm, sounds like the Neville Brothers bustin' out some Crescent City jam. Hendrix holds presence in the midsong break, which sounds like a building on fire, and closing to "I'm the Man Down There."
"There are some traditional players who want to stay with that same flatbed, boring, tired-ass beat," Taylor is quoted in the liner notes. "They look at me like, 'You're not really playing the blues, see.' The blues is like a tree. If you don't give it water to grow it will die, man."
Coco Montoya: Can't Look Back (Alligator)
Montoya learned blues guitar literally at the hand of the great Albert Collins, in whose band Montoya first played drums. He moved from Collins' band into a slot as guitarist in John Mayall's legendary Bluesbreakers before moving out as a solo artist; his 1995 debut album Gotta Mind to Travel earned him Best New Artist at the 1996 W. C. Handy Awards.
Montoya delivers a blues set in the loosest sense of the word: Blues serve as source material but have almost nothing to do with this finished product, a blues album sort of like the way an album by Eric Clapton, Dire Straits, or The Band would be a blues album. Can't Look Back moves with a strong rhythmic pulse, slowing only rarely into mournful blues. Montoya wrings plenty of raw emotion, both from his vocal and guitar, from the one old fashioned slow blues grind on this set, "Can't See the Street For My Tears."
"Running Away From Love" hits hard and lowdown, a two-fisted roadhouse blues that also summons the spirit of ZZ Top. "Women Have A Way With A Fool" also nods more than a little to another legendary Texas bluesman, Stevie Ray Vaughan, while his firebrand solo in "Trip, Stumble and Fall" filters the sounds of both Stevie Ray and Hendrix through prismatic pyrotechnics into the instrumental highlight of the entire set. Montoya also updates his mentor Collins' "Same Old Thing" (to sound like anything but) and his cover of "Something About You" thumps and shimmies like the Motown classic (penned by Holland, Dozier & Holland for the Four Tops) that it is.
Chris Thomas King: Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues (21st Century Blues)
Allen Iverson hip-hop culture meets the Muddy Waters blues tradition: King steps out for the first time on his own label with no smaller a purpose than to play pure acoustic and electric guitar blues while simultaneously updating the blues with the urban flavor of hard beats, samples, loops, and turntables. "I see Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues as a defining album for both myself and for the blues genre, and a test for the blues genre," King said in an interview with The Boston Globe, "to see whether it will move forward."
Almost entirely composed, performed, and produced by King (one track features King's father Tabby Thomas, himself a Louisiana blues pillar, on vocals, but that's it), Hip-Hop Blues is more successful than not. King's uncut blues remain potent, especially his slide down "Tha Real" and his update of Skip James' "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues," which King performed in O Brother Where Art Thou as Delta blues legend Tommy Johnson (so it's an update of his update), deathly serious acoustic delta blues. "Da Thrill Is Gone From Here" is the track with Tabby, featuring a rap from King while his guitar pays tribute to B. B. King's famous tale of woe built around this simple, powerful phrase.
But the tracks where King stylistically mixes it up sound truly blue, too. As a composition and especially in King's passionate vocal performance, "Feel Me" could be a Marvin Gaye sex ballad played as a blues; "Give Me A Chance" is another ballad that's more effective than most hip-hop or blues lovesongs. "Revelations" features a sample from "John the Revelator" by Son House and a vocal and guitar that respectfully bow toward Waters' "Rollin' and Tumblin'." The lyrics to "Welcome to Da Jungle" really bring King's concept home: "Welcome to da jungle/ This is my home/ The birth of the blues/ The birth of this song." Because you can find the blues anywhere you can find a person with a heart to feel 'em.
As King nails down the hip-hop beat of the closing "N Word Rap" with a funky chicken-scratched guitar riff copped from James Brown, he repeatedly crows," "This is the blues of the 21st century and I don't give a damn if you can't get with me." It's your loss if you don't at least try.
Various Artists: Hey Bo Diddley: A Tribute! (Evidence)
Like the music he played, Bo Diddley was born in Mississippi and matured in Chicago. There's a good case to be made that he would not have called the "three plus two over four" or "hand jive" rhythm of which he was the progenitor "rock & roll," or even "R&B." He most likely thought he was playing the blues -- albeit in a different rhythm, yet the blues nonetheless. So perhaps this compilation, modern blues stars and legends bounding through fifteen tracks either composed by or associated with Diddley during his seminal mid-1950s through early 1960s peak, is overdue. It sure seems to suggest that if you don't know the blues, you don't know Diddley.
I'm sorry. Like you wouldn't have written it.
You can really hear the blues in these songs -- specifically the sound of moanin' country blues upbeat-en and beaten up into screaming, fast-paced Windy City blues -- thanks to such contributors as Taj Mahal, Otis Rush, Corey Harris, two guitarists for the renown Bluesbreakers (Coco Montoya and Walter Trout) and Son Seals, all working with rockin' backup assembled and led by guitarist Charlie Karp (drummer James Wormworth, Peter Fish on keyboards, and bassist Michael Merritt).
The rootsy Mahal, for example, has rarely sounded more potent than on the opening "Bo Diddley," one of this set's most fully realized tracks; choosing to solo on acoustic guitar, in the context of an electric band, makes Mahal sound even more downhome nasty. Trout sets the tale of "Road Runner" (a favorite of artists from the Sex Pistols to the Zombies) ablaze with the feel of boundless teenage energy, as does Eric Sardinas' romp with "Josephine." More darkly, Rush simply strangles the primal, majestic sound of howlin' electric Chicago guitar blues from "I'm A Man."
"Everybody's searching for their own identity, and it's often hard to find yourself," writes Montoya in the liner notes. "And Bo did -- you always know when you're hearin' Bo."
Various Artists: Blues Around the Clock (Pablo)
Here's the blues equivalent of the legendary Yankees "Murderer's Row": Joe Turner with a big Count Basie band, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson with Basie, then Turner meets Jimmy Witherspoon in a blues shout-out, T-Bone Walker leads a Jazz at the Philharmonic ensemble which includes Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, and Zoot Sims, then the Muddy Waters blues band rocks the night away to close.
In "Kick the Front Door In" as well as the title track to Blues Around the Clock, Turner sounds like the seminal shouter who beat Bill Haley to the punch and helped midwife rock & roll with "Shake, Rattle & Roll." Then with Witherspoon on the rollicking, uptempo "Baby What You Want Me To Do," he typifies the sound of American music right after blues had morphed into rhythm & blues yet just before R&B turned into rock & roll. The basic chord progression and toe-tappin' beat in Walker's "Goin' to Chicago Blues" also became a staple of early rock.
On the other hand, Vinson's blood-curdling shout in the first verse to "Just a Dream On My Mind" and the cold, metallic trumpet solo (by either Terry or Gillespie) in T-Bone's final number, his classic "Stormy Monday," are pure, murderous blues.
There's a great story told by saxophonist Talib Kibwe, musical director for Randy Weston, in these liner notes: Weston was preparing for a special blues set at the 1998 Montreal Jazz Festival that was to include guitarist Johnny Copeland. Copeland got sick, and Robert Jr. Lockwood was brought in as a replacement. When Lockwood first walked into rehearsal, he asked what he was supposed to play. "You know, that older blues," said Kibwe, "like Count Basie in Kansas City."
"That's the new blues, man," Lockwood replied. "Son, you know the difference between blues and jazz? When you put the bridge in the song it becomes jazz, take it out and it's blues."
