Jazz Articles about James Blood Ulmer

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James Blood Ulmer: Bad Blood in the City: The Piety Street Sessions

by Ian Patterson
May 10, 2007

The Piety recording studio, where James Blood Ulmer recorded Bad Blood in the City: The Piety Street Sessions, stands on the corner of Piety and Dauphine Streets, the original route of the famous Desire streetcar line in New Orleans' ninth ward. In an early scene from Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley enters the kitchen leaving the door open so that “the perpetual blue piano" can be heard from the neighborhood. “This blue piano," Williams explains, “expresses the ...

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Odyssey the Band: Back in Time

by AAJ Italy Staff
September 27, 2006

Negli ultimi anni il chitarrista-cantante James Blood Ulmer si è spostato ad esplorare scenari singolari di blues post-rurale, ottenendo risultati di grande interesse. I suoi recenti lavori hanno il pregio di essere basati sulla rilettura di elementi tradizionali filtrati dalla sua peculiare visione mutuata da quella sensibilità di avanguardista ‘sui generis’ che tutti gli riconoscono. In questo caso però Ulmer richiama al suo fianco il violinista Charles Burnham e il batterista Warren Benbow e ricrea la magia del progetto Odissey ...

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James Blood Ulmer: There is Another Place to Go

by Paul Olson
August 9, 2005

Guitarist James Blood Ulmer's played his way through a veritable history of American music. Beginning guitar as a four-year-old in 1946, Ulmer was singing professionally with the gospel group The Southern Sons while still in grade school. Ulmer went on to play guitar on the national R&B/doo-wop chitlin' circuit until he devoted himself to jazz, becoming something of a Wes Montgomery imitator until he reinvented himself as, well, himself, playing in Detroit in the 1960s with the likes of Pharoah ...

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James Blood Ulmer: Birthright

by C. Michael Bailey
May 30, 2005

James Blood Ulmer continues the all-out assault on the blues that he began with 2001's Memphis Blood and continued with No Escape From the Blues, released in 2003. After thirty years riding the edge of the avant-garde with the harmolodic Ornette Coleman and others, Ulmer emerges as a rural blues Sun Ra, a 21st century musical prophet with an irreverent smattering of Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Cecil Taylor.

Birthright is ostensibly a solo “acoustic blues recording, but saying that is ...

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James Blood Ulmer: No Escape from the Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions

by David Vance
February 5, 2004

James Blood Ulmer's raw, aggressive guitar work with Ornette Coleman, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and others established him as one of the brightest lights in contemporary jazz. By adapting elements of rock (particularly Jimi Hendrix) and blues to Coleman's melodic language and incorporating bizarre alternate tunings, Ulmer, along with Sonny Sharrock and Derek Bailey, was one of the few early guitarists to find a voice in free jazz. With No Escape from the Blues, however, free jazz doesn't seem to be ...

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James Blood Ulmer: No Escape From The Blues

by Charlie B. Dahan
December 5, 2003

While best known for his work with Ornette Coleman and in the modern jazz world, James “Blood" Ulmer has recorded two fantastic blues records recently. His follow up to Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions is the equally provocative and musically exciting work No Escape From The Blues. 2003 was declared the year of the blues by Congress and what has flooded the market has been a series of reissues and recompiling of older material that give the ...

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James Blood Ulmer: No Escape From the Blues

by C. Michael Bailey
October 12, 2003

Jazz Raconteur James Blood Ulmer began his blues march with the release of 2001’s Memphis Blood . On that release Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, convinced that Ulmer was one of the last great blues singers, wanted to record the iconoclast in Memphis at the famed Sun Studios. The result was a collection of blues standards presented in a way that can only be described as enigmatic genius. Dense and dedicated, Ulmer’s blues vision is large and impressive in a Chester ...