Cds 3 - Macallè Blues

CASSANDRA WILSON

"Coming forth by day"

Legacy Rec. (USA) - 2015

Don't explain/Billie's blues/Crazy he calls me/You go to my head/All of me/The way you look tonight/Good morning heartache/What a little moonlight can do/These foolish things/Strange fruit/I'll be seeing you/Last song (for Lester)

Androgynous creature with such an ambiguous and shady charm, splendid Mississippi singer, Cassandra Wilson does it again. In this cd, dedicated to Billie Holiday - Lady Day - on the occasion of the centennial of her birth, the crepuscular, nocturnal, at times even anxious atmospheres are dominant and are the same already broadly experimented in its previous ’93 masterpiece Blue Light 'Till Dawn, immediately repeated with the following and always excellent, even if less surprising, New Moon Daughter.
In Coming Fourth By Day Wilson dips herself down into the most sincere yet investigated pages of Holiday’s songbook, giving us back a very personal and even debatable reading of them all, certainly far from the typical expressive range of Lady Day, but sincere, intense and shared. The dark, brown smoothness of her deep contralto voice, provided with a timbre much more related to Abbey Lincoln rather than to Holiday herself, together with texture and arrangements that are legitimate descendants of musicians and producer of declared gothic-rock extraction (the producer, Nick Launay, has been the producer of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds) confer to the disk, rather than the fragile, wounded drama of the originals, a more mysterious and, sometimes, estranging atmospheres. So that, listening to this Coming Fourth By Day, it seems to be in a room with a view on Holiday rather than absorbed in her dense emotional world. A view with a rarefied horizon, only at times blessed by the clear light of a sunny day, where the dominant feel is dizziness, induced by the distances and by the indefinite, sometimes unrecognizable, contours. It is a slow descent into a auditory maelström that reinterprets and, even more, redrafts the same artwork it should want pay homage to.
There are some analogous precedents: Dr. John and his Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch, for example. In this specific case, the artist retraced, in a highly personal way, some pages from Louis Armstrong’s repertoire, transfiguring them through the filter of his own sensibility and writing. Likewise here, Cassandra Wilson travels through Holiday’s path again, reshaping its route. You Go To My Head, for instance, almost assumes Philly sound like contours due to the strings arranged by Van Dyke Parks, just like All Of Me that loses its original, bright swing for a much more colloquial yet rarefied atmosphere.               
After some of the most famous Lady Day’s songs Cassandra Wilson adds, by the end, the only original tune of the cd, Last Song (For Lester), which is an imaginary, dramatic monologue that day-dreams around the feelings of Billie Holiday about the death of her great friend and companion, saxophonist Lester Young.  
As a matter of fact, once the remake of great classics has been faced it cannot be only faithful and end to itself, but it has to be a challenge that knows how to face even the greatest seas, abandoning the routes traced by the nautical papers. And who better than Wilson and her bystander companions would have ever been able to undertake it with such knowledge, sensitivity and even good success in revealing us new landings?! G.R.

RONNIE EARL & THE BROADCASTERS

"Father's day"

Stony Plain Rec. (Usa) - 2015

It takes time/Higher love/Right place, wrong time/What have I done wrong/Givin' up/Every night about this time/Father's day/I need you so bad/I'll take care of you/Follow your heart/Moanin'/All your love/Precious Lord

Ronnie Earl has reduced his live performances in US to the rank of appreciated rarity while the ones in old Europe are, since a long time, nonexistent. On the other hand, he has nearly gotten us used to annual and constant recording outings. Father’s Day follows that rule too. After just a one-year distance or a bit more from the previous Good News, it gives us the opportunity to discuss again about him. To say that, from Ronnie Earl, we can always know what to expect is such of an obviousness; but there is who affirms that with the spirit of the detractor and who, instead, does it with the affection and the passion that are surely due to him. Given the undeniable artistic stature of Earl, we connect, firm in our conviction, to the second group. Certainly, we can always expect something good from him so that we could, blindfolded, pull out from his discography a record at random and we would choose well anyway. This last work is no way exception to the rule.
Undisputed master of tone, phrasing and intensity, his guitar knows how to be so sharp, deep just as velvety and liquid. During all of his career, Earl has been always entirely focused on his instrument leaving the singing (at times only sporadic, considering the purely instrumental vocation of many of his releases) to third. In this last effort, instead, the singing dominates in quantity and it’s fairly shared between the excellent Michael Ledbetter, stone, muscular singer equipped of a lyric kind of emission and a well trained diaphragm, already singer in the band of guitarist Nick Moss and Diane Blue, passionate singer and outstanding harp player with a previous experience as recording artist on her own right, first woman ever to join the Broadcasters. Differently from the preceding Earl's outings, this last Father's Day makes the difference, therefore, for spirit, style and renewed interest in the blues as a music form. Dedicated to his late father Akos (as the title explains), the raids in the Latin and jazz territories almost entirely disappear here while the intense, mainly Chicago blues returns bossy and absolute protagonist just as the vibrating version of Right Place, Wrong Time second only to Otis Rush’s original version or the excellent, numerous tributes to Magic Sam or to the soul-blues just like the dark, flat ballad I'll Take of You or, again, the unexpected Givin' Up, songs respectively become classics through Bobby "Blue" Bland and Donny Hathaway’s voices. With Moanin' Earl cuts out the only small room here for his old instrumental habits and, by the end, the last surprise that leads us to the closing, is the sacred Precious Lord, reconciling secular prayer that could be interpreted in psychological way too as metaphoric approach among the figures of the secular, late father and the other "precious", heavenly father. In the cd, the clear, “churchy” Hammond is played by Dave Limina, while the precise and vigorous drums is by Lorn Entress. To complete the line up and make rockier the wall of sound, Jim Mouradian on bass and the return in the Broadcasters, of a horn section, incarnate here by a strong sax duo with Mario Perrett on tenor and the talented Scott Shetler on baritone. G.R.

BAD NEWS BARNES & THE BRETHREN OF BLUES BAND

"90 proof truth"

Flaming Saddies Rec. (Usa) - 2015

CD: America needs a queen/Salt, sugar & fat/Post op transgender/Hungry and horny/Westboro Baptist blues/90 proof truth/CIA/Lawyer riding shotgun/Going down/Boom boom (out goes the lights)/Raise your hand/My ding-a-ling
DVD: America needs a queen/Westboro Baptist blues/Going down/90 proof truth/Someday baby

No DOC, DOCG or IGP at all, but the affirmation reported on the bottom of the cover certifies the content as CHB, that is "Contemporary Hokum Blues". Authoritative academic sources remember us that the term "hokum blues" identifies that kind of sometimes improvised, even simple and easygoing blues, filled with double-edged expressions of prevailing sexual character, borrowed from minstrels shows and vaudeville, very popular in the first decades of '900 thanks to artists like Tampa Red, Gus Cannon and Casey Bill Weldon, to name a few, and addressed to a naïve public with the purpose to get, even with moderate effort, a fat laughter. According to this definition, if Bad News Barnes’s is hokum blues, for certain it would not seem directed to simple minds really; or perhaps would it be that "contemporary" to imply an evolution of the genre and, therefore, of the audience itself? It could be! As a matter of fact, what Bad News (Chris) Barnes offers here is witty socio-political satire served in a blues form; music to reflect on and, undoubtedly, to laugh too since as Barnes seems to know well, who doesn't laugh, cannot be really considered a serious person.
Barnes’s career has always been in unstable equilibrium between theatre, television and music. After having participated to different, famous American TV shows, it has returned to unbalance on the blues with this double exit: cd, of course, and a dvd that contains four videos of tunes already present in audio format plus a bonus track, Someday Baby, with Felicia Collins. If years ago Italian band Pitura Freska wished a black pope for Vatican, well, Barnes begins pushing himself even over them hymning, with the introductive America Needs a Queen, to a more than female US President. Then, the long gust of desecrating parodies of famous songs starts: Shake, Rattle & Roll becomes Salt, Sugar & Fat, Earl King’s Come On becomes Hungry And Horny and, since Church lies on Chris Barnes’s firing line too, Bobbie Gentry’s Ode To Billy Joe becomes a witty mockery of righteousness and hypocrisy in Westboro Baptist Blues, sung along with Dana Fuchs and Felicia Collins. To complete the framework there is the comic, amusing Post Op Transgender and also some covers such as Don Nix’s Going Down and the conclusive Dave Bartholomew’s My Ding A Ling. Stellar musicians and a strong horn section formed by Tom "Bones" Malone on trombone, "Blue" Lou Marini on sax and, last but no least, the late and legendary Lew Soloff on trumpet, sideman with Blood Sweat & Tears, Lou Reed, Aretha Franklin and Elvis Costello.
In conclusion, still bringing up enology, Bad News Barnes is just like often underestimated Lambrusco should be: sparkling and sharp. G.R.  

CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE

"I ain't lyin'..."

Henrietta Rec. (Usa) - 2015

Good blues tonight/Done somebody wrong/Long lean lanky mama/Always been your friend/If I should have bad luck/My kinda gal/Blues, why do you worry me?/300 miles to go/Long leg woman/Christo redemptor/Good blues tonight (unedited)

"I Ain't Lyin'. ": the title is the slangy affirmation repeated by Musselwhite, as insisted interjection throughout the cd, but it is also metaphor of authenticity and purity, qualities that can be well applied to the artistic history of this good ol’ boy from Mississippi, harpist and singer. Recorded live in two different sessions, respectively at the Valley of The Moon Vintage Festival in California and at the Clarksdale Soundstage in Mississippi by the end of 2014, the cd shows a Musselwhite in top form, supported by his current trio made of highly competent young fellows, formed by the talented Mattew Stubbs on guitar, Steve Froberg on bass and June Core on drums. The program here includes almost all self-penned tunes except for the famous Elmore James Done Somebody Wrong and Duke Pearson Christo Redemptor (recorded, at the time, by the legendary jazz trumpet player Donald Byrd and included in his marvelous Blue Note album A New Perspective) which Musselwhite already recorded in his first, famed record Stand Back back in 1967.
With this new issue, Musselwhite confirms once again his status of harmonica master. Left behind the ethnic digressions that, occasionally in the past, have led him to mix his music with other Caribbean or Latin sounds, he definitely seems returned back home, in the heart of the Delta that was origin of everything, slightly transfigured here by the personal run of the artist. The atmosphere that dominates in this release is, of course, the juke joint’s one but the ability of Musselwhite in discovering and being backed by new talents added to its personal artistic history, mark the difference in the overall sound and in the final effect. Memory and novelty, could be said: the exuberant, sharp guitar sound of the young Stubbs and the powerful rhythm section of the duo Froberg-June infuse modernity to the rigor of the tradition. Harmonious and get up to speed line up, it constitutes the ideal counterpart to the leader that, along the tracks  appears amused and laid-back just like in Long Lean Lanky Mama and 300 Miles To Go just as more introspective and participating in Always Been Your Friend, My Kinda Gal or Blues Why Give You Worry Me?.      
It’s been said that the artists escape from the world and get back to it through a metaphor that is the artistic work itself. Trying to mediate, from this motto, a definition that could stick to Musselwhite we could say that his artistic path has taken the form of the spiral: it returns on the same line of the point of departure, but marking from it a gap. That gap is the result of experience, collaborations, contaminations, mixture with young energies and the mutual influence that those energies carry along and that's all well summarized in this last Musselwhite’s incarnation, final recap of a long trip back to his renewed origins. G.R.