Telarc International has slowly and quietly been populating its jazz and blues rosters with some of the foremost talent performing and recording today. The jazz roles boast the late Ray Brown, Oscar Peterson, Monty Alexander, Geoff Keezer, Benny Green, Russell Malone, Tierney Sutton, and McCoy Tyner. Th blues stables are just as impressive with Bob Margolin, Jimmy Thackery, Tab Benoit, Joe Louis Walker, Tommy Castro, and Jimmy Hall. While the jazz output remains straightforward and mainstream (accepting Ray Brown's successful Some of My Best Friends Are... series and Monty Alexander's Jamaican Explorations), the blues offerings provide a few surprises and take some significant creative risks.

In addition to individual artist releases, Telarc Blues has established two cutting edge series, employing all of their house stars and then some. The first series, recently completed, highlights the Mississippi Delta Blues of Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, and Mississippi Fred McDowall, devoting a disc to each of them. Recently, these three discs were collected into an aggressively priced three-disc set, provocative for the amount of music, its high level of invention and creativity, and it affordability. The second series is the reinterpretation, in a blues setting, of seminal late 1960s and early '70s rock albums. Included here are blues inoculated interpretations of The Beatles' The White Album, Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, and The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. Both of these series are worthy of discussion on an individual basis.

The Music of Charlie Patton

Necessarily, this recording should be acoustic and the majority of it is. This music may be more sacred than Robert Johnson's in that as a recorded legacy, it provides one of the best testaments of the songster temperament of the itinerate rural blues singers. Patton's recorded output was greater than that of Johnson's and that accepted. The interpretations contained herein are conservative to a point but do take some interesting liberties. Telarc assembled a variety of modern blues singers to tackle the considerable project of interpreting the Music of Charlie Patton.

The highlights are many. Steve James addresses "Elder Green Blues" with slide guitar (and mandolin overdubbed) and string bass. James' voice is a growl and his slide guitar precise. Charlie Musselwhite approaches "Pea Vine Blues" with care, his guitar crisp. "I Shall Not Be Moved" indicates the songster disposition of Patton, who would call on the Church as much as the jook joint for subjects. Joe Louis Walker, who sings with a menacing conviction, gives "Sugar Mama" a keen workout. Colleen Sexton makes a medley of "Down the Dirt Road Blues" and "When Your Way Gets Dark." It is a blissful way to end this fine recording.

But it is the center of the recording that gives up its masterpiece. Snooky Pryor turns in the performance of the disc with a harmonica-vocals take on perhaps Patton's most famous recording "Pony Blues." This song more than any of the others captures the desperate spirit of Charlie Patton's music.

The Music of Robert Johnson

I have mixed feelings about a tribute disc to a phantom. Robert Johnson's craft is as essential to world culture as Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, the Koran, and Citizen Kane. In my experience, tribute discs contain one or two performances that are over the top wonderful (such as Buddy Guy's "Red House" on the Hendrix Tribute and Hootie and the Blowfish on the Zep Tribute). Therefore, I had pretty low expectations of Hellhound on My Trail: Songs of Robert Johnson. After all, how could Robert "I'm Addicted to Love" Palmer sneak sally through the alley on the blues canon? To my glee, I discovered a tribute disc that should be owned along side The Complete Robert Johnson.

Why, might you ask? Because we are fortunate to have performing on this disc, perhaps the last of the practicing bluesmen that actually knew Robert Johnson, particularly Dave "Honeyboy" Edwards who was present the night Johnson was allegedly poisoned and Robert Jr. Lockwood, who learned at the foot of the phantom as Johnson kept house with his mother. With a groan as deep as the delta he hailed from, betraying his 80-some odd years, Dave Edwards metaphorically returns to Friar's Point Mississippi with Johnson's "Traveling Riverside Blues". Edwards still plays a mean bottleneck guitar and his voice has as many rings as a Mississippi Pine Tree. He closes the song with the words, "That's pretty close to it". Indeed.