Jazz Articles about Sonny Landreth

Sonny Landreth: Recorded Live in Lafayette

by C. Michael Bailey
July 8, 2017

Slide guitarist Sonny Landreth releases his third live recording after 2005's Grant Street (Sugar Hill Records) and 2007's Sonny Landreth -Live at 2007 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (Munckmusic). Far from just another live release from a jam band, Recorded Live in Lafayette reveals some clever programming by Landreth. Disc one of this two-disc set is an acoustic collection featuring Landreth on his signature resophonic steel-body guitar. This is a departure from his previous live shows, which were typically ...

Sonny Landreth: Bound By the Blues

by C. Michael Bailey
June 13, 2015

Fresh Cream (Atco) was released in 1966, at the height of the blues revival that began in the late 1950s with the publication of Samuel Charter's The Country Blues (Rinehart, 1950) and the subsequent release of the LP The Country Blues (Folkways, 1959). In the early blues revival, it was the rural, acoustic blues that were resurrected and celebrated. Then the ancient-by-any-standards folk songs made it to Great Britain, they were assimilated and recreated in a sonic image not previously ...

Peter Novelli: St. Amant Sessions

by C. Michael Bailey
June 7, 2015

Peter Novelli's St. Amant Sessions smacks of Tab Benoit's The Sea Saint Sessions (Telarc, 2003). For Benoit, the significance of Sea Saint Studios is that they are a NOLA landmark founded by Allen Toussaint. For Novelli, St. Amant, LA is up I-10 between NOLA and Baton Rouge. There, Brignac's Sound Shack resides and this is where, Novelli recorded his third collection, St. Amant Sessions. Both men play a brand of American and blues that can immediately be identified as from ...

Sonny Landreth: Elemental Journey

by C. Michael Bailey
June 23, 2012

Sonny Landreth Elemental Journey Landfall Records 2012 How did we arrive at the phenomenon that is guitarist Sonny Landreth? In his autobiography, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (Da Capo Press, 1969), African American composer W. C. Handy detailed his experience of sleeping on the train platform in Tutwiler, Mississippi, en route to Clarksdale, around 1903. At one point, Handy was awakened from his Delta slumber by: “a lean, ...

Sonny Landreth: Grant Street

by C. Michael Bailey
February 12, 2005

Sonny Landreth Grant Street Sugar Hill Records 2005 “A [man] had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept...as he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly... “Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog..." ~W.C. Handy, early 20th Century, Tutwiler Train Station, Tutwiler, Mississippi.

Sonny Landreth: The Road We're On

by C. Michael Bailey
December 26, 2002

. . .Falling out of solution, perfectly.

The title of innovator is one not to be overused, and in all of the history of music there have only been a handful. When restricting the discussion to the technical performance aspects of guitar, three true innovators come to mind. Jimi Hendrix shot the electric guitar into the stratosphere with his blues pyrotechnics on songs such as “Machine Gun" and “Voodoo Chile (A Slight return)." Eddie Van Halen came along to initiate ...

Sonny Landreth: Levee Town

by C. Michael Bailey
June 1, 2001

For slide guitar enthusiasts, it doesn't get any better than this.

It is interesting that the finest slide guitarist playing would use a Louisiana Zydeco fare to display his considerable talent rather than its Mississippi cousin, the Blues, but that is exactly what Sonny Landreth does. In the same way that Jimi Hendrix goosed the evolution of playing the electric blues, has Landreth done for the slide guitar. Born in the Mississippi, the slide guitar has had an impressive list ...