Spoon's voice is so hoarse that you wonder if he's gonna make it to the end of each song. Actually he died from throat cancer two years after this 1995 live recording in a Vancouver club. But the then 75-year old veteran never lets his voice fail him.
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| Spoon & Robillard |
Robillard and Gordon, on the contrary, are in an impressive form. Robillard is on a jazz trip and one foresees his top-notch performance a few years later in his “Conversations in Swing Guitar” with Herb Ellis...
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| Robillard & Gordon |
If you add the acoustic bass wizard Marty Ballou and his homonym band mate drummer Marty Richards, and ice on the cake, Long John Baldry as vocal guest on the last track, you understand you can expect an appealing live moment.
The moment, though titled “Jimmy Witherspoon with The Duke Robillard Band” starts without… Spoon ! You'll have to wait 14 minutes of pure fine jazz from Duke and Sax before Spoon jumps on stage. The show then takes a cool laid-back late night jazz flavored blues turn with the appropriately chosen “Going Down Slow” superbly sung by Spoon.
Spoon actually sings the blues like a jazz singer, a feeling emphasized by his broken voice. He doesn't need to shout (which he was most likely unable to do then) to deliver a heartfelt singing. On the contrary he seems to compensate his vocal fragility with an extra dose of soulfulness on classics he's been singing hundreds of times : “Big Boss Man”, “Ain't Nobody's Business” or “I'll Always Be In Love With You”.
Robilllard's guitar, Gordon's sax and even drum or bass solos from Richards and Ballou give a clear jazz spicing to these blues songs, particularly to “Stormy Monday Blues”, the absolute highlight of this live recording : Spoon, Robillard and Gordon seem to compete for the trophy of who delivers the most subtly intense emotion. A really unique performance !
To close the show, Spoon calls his long-time friend British-born Baldry who settled in Vancouver in the mid-1980s, and both men go through the old standard “Times Gettin' Tougher Than Tough” they used to sing already thirty years back.
Jazz pianist & saxophonist John Lee Sanders once said of Spoon : “In the 1940s and 1950s this man was king of the blues, he recorded with the greats, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Gerry Mulligan, he was the bridge between the southern bluesmen and the hip West Coast jazz blues scene...” Nothing to add, that's exactly it ! ■
■ It's incredible to discover how many musicians from different horizons (jazz, blues...) Spoon sang with !
Here are just a few examples, but there's loads of “audio only” stuff on YT...
► With Art Pepper, Lighthouse Cafe, Los Angeles 1981 : https://youtu.be/vqZ4T0NfrP4 and https://youtu.be/5FNtQ2rKObg
■ The undated
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