Cds 4 - Macallè Blues

Billy Price and Otis Clay already met long ago and collaborated artistically several times in the past, both on stage and on recording sessions (Clay appeared, first, in The Soul Collection and, second, in Night Work, both Billy Price’s records). This Time For Real represents instead the last official Otis Clay’s recording, but also his first complete studio collaboration with Billy Price. Therefore - and finally - a whole two-voice cd.

Clay’s Mississippi origins and vocal debuts are both well known. As a singer, he started from the sacred crib of gospel and became, along the way, step by step, more close to secular music, nevertheless he was never unaware of his church background. About soul singer Billy Price we know his starting experience as member of guitar wizard Roy Buchanan’s band and his following soloist debuts, by the beginning of '80s, with a record that prophetically took its title from one of Otis Clay first hits, Is It Over, song written by Sam Mosley, that was a constant presence in Clay’s repertoire. In a certain way, while making this record Billy Price has, perhaps, achieved the dream of a lifetime whereas Clay has concluded his own with a symbolic recognition to the worth and the value of Price.

Billy Price got a sour, wide tenor voice with a tense vibrato. It well mixes up with Otis Clay’s rough, large grain with unexpected, amazing melodic glares vocal character. Starting with these premises, the two singers exquisitely realize a well amalgamated job that opens with the initial, jubilant spur of Somebody's Changing My Sweet Baby's Mind, tune recorded once by the underestimated Johnny Sayles, and it closes with a strong version of You Got Me Hummin' , written by Isaac Hayes and engraved to eternal memory into the most classical Memphis repertoire by Sam & Dave. Between these two extremes, our two singers stir agile on a sequence of songs that extends from the funky Goin' To The Shack by Syl Johnson up to that amusing, ironic sequence of bad lucks listed by Joe Tex’s pen that would happen to the author in case he didn't hold faith to the promise declared in the title, I'll Never Do You Wrong. Memphis goes back to be protagonist thanks to that obsessive portrait of a philosophical lover that is Too Many Hands, written by Teenie Hodges, well known Hi Records’s house band guitarist, while country music peeps out on that delicious watercolour that is Book Of Memories. But it is when the rhythm slows down that Clay’s melodic, sibilant syllabicate joined to Price’s interpretative sensibility produce the more juicy fruits. In that sense, I'm Afraid Of Losing You becomes a fragile, vibrating secular confession as well as the modern Los Lobos’s spiritual Tears Of God that is recalled here with deep, fervent abandonment. Another Clay's classic, Love Don't Love Nobody, a Spinners’s hit from the ‘80s, relives here in an interpretation where the story is seldom proposed with a tone of resigned abandonment and with Billy Price, on to end, putting effort into an intimate, spoken confession. Not secondary to the overall result of this record is the Duke Robillard’s band, at once essential and discreet in the total economy of the work. G.R.

His most recent landing place, dated back to 2009, has been the one with Catfood Records, label for which, also the current Tiger In A Cage has been issued. Despite Rawls has been covering the guitarist, singer, author and arranger roles for a long time, in this last effort he plays just the singer’s one, leaving the whole guitar duty to Johnny McGhee, who’s been Togetherness & Devotion’s guitarist. Representative of the most sincere soul blues tradition, revisited in such a modern key, although a bit far from the interpretative depths of the much more well known leading figures of the genre, Rawls is however a singer with a genuine and effective singing. Linear tenor voice with husky chestnut brown glares, Rawls performs a whole repertoire that skilfully proposes primarily original tunes integrated with some well chosen covers. Among the covers we can find a cheerful Sam Cooke’s Having A Party and Your Love Is Lifting Me Higher. Among the originals, instead, I’d like to mention the titletrack Tiger In A Cage, tune with social implications written by bass player Bob Trenchard and, also coming from the same pen, the delicious Southern Honey, Cajun taste in Louisiana sauce ballad performed by both Rawls and brilliant Mississippi pianist Eden Brent, present just as marvelous singer this time. The track list goes on with some tunes taken from previous Johnny Rawls’s cds just as Red Cadillac or the conclusive I Would Be Nothing. Just like a good part of the records issued by Catfood Records, this one also ought to be read in a choral key. Essential, for the final results, is in fact the job done by The Rays, the house band, and last but by no means least, the one of Jim Gaines, producer with great taste and experience. G.R.