Glen David Andrews - Portrait Of The Tremé Prince (2019)

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A spiritual son of Satchmo

Let's say all you know about Glen David Andrews is that he is a trombone player from New Orleans, and as you're not a big jazz fan, you imagine this must be a boring jazz album full of boring trombone. Well, you got it 100% wrong on both points !

Boring is certainly not the word to use about this “Portrait Of The Tremé Prince”, a compilation of some of his most representative works released in 2019 on Louisiana Red Hot Records. Already, the name of the label itself, which evokes a famous hot pepper sauce plantation and factory in Ile Petite Anse (Avery Island) in the middle of the Vermilion Bay bayous, sounds like a thrilling promise !

Deacon John - Live At The 1994 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (1999), Deacon John's Jump Blues : Music From The Film (2003)

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The most unknown famous musician
from New Orleans
A short man with the modest look of an anonymous office worker dressed in a dull gray suit, with bow tie, two-colored shoes and a little hat that seems too small for his head, with a constant vacuous smile revealing a solid set of upper teeth, and a twinkle in the eyes that do not succeed in hiding flashes of melancholy… Don't be misled : the man is not what he looks like. Not really known outside of New Orleans, he is a legend in his home city.

This is the strange paradox of “Deacon” John Moore. Without any hit under his name, he can be heard on lots of iconic recordings from New Orleans early R'n'B kings and queens !

Tommy Castro, 3 Albums : Exception To The Rule (1995), Can't Keep A Good Man Down (1997), Soul Shaker (2005)

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Castrocaster

Armed with his treasured Fender Stratocaster guitar, Tommy Castro mixed three main ingredients to produce his winning sound : muscular blues-infused blend of R&B and rock, searing guitar work mixing rhythm and lead, and impassioned vocals strongly influenced by Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, James Brown or Otis Redding.

From the start his band line-up was build according to the blues-rock  trinity ― guitar-bass-drums ― but he added an extra instrument to spice up the R'n'B flavor : a saxophone held by the fourth member of the band, Keith Crossan. And last but not least, he is also a striking songwriter.

Mel Brown & The Homewreckers (feat. Denny Freeman) - Under Yonder: Mel Brown Live At Pop The Gator 1991 (2016)

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Wreckin' the joint

Ten blues classics performed live in the famous club Pop the Gator in Kitchener (Ontario, Canada), nothing very original when you give a look at the tracklist, titles you've heard dozens of times…

But wait wait wait... it's Mel Brown playing, here ! And that changes everything. The whole thing is turning into an orgiastic show of unique electrifying guitars and passionate vocals, with the gripping help of his guest friend the late Texan guitarist Denny Freeman (1), and the backing of his super tight homewrecking band.

Flyin' Saucers - Blues Attack! (1998) / Flyin' Saucers Gumbo Special - Nothin' But (2019)

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Nothin'... but with a French touch
Their first album and the latest one. Almost 25 years between them during which they definitely turned towards Louisiana music and adapted their name accordingly.

Flyin' Saucers - Blues Attack! (1998)
This “Blues Attack!” smells the sticky smoky atmosphere of the Mississippi country juke-joints or down-home blues bars of Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans or… Bordeaux.

For their first album, the band neglected the studios and preferred the energetic spontaneity of a live recording (on a two-track analog recorder) in their den, the legendary Cricketeers blues bar in their home city of Bordeaux.

Nakia - Blues Grifter (2018)

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A matter of voice

Raised in Alabama, living in Austin, built like a wrestler, gifted with powerful vocal genes, Nakia Reynoso was a semi-finalist of the singing reality show contest “The Voice” in 2011. Immediately you worry ! At the same time, as his album is labeled as blues, curiosity gets hold of you. So you play it, just a bit, to check if it's true…

And, surprise !, what you hear is blues indeed, a heavily soul-infused blues sung with a powerful gravel-textured voice backed by a nice little band, the Blues Grifters, featuring a skilled guitarist named Mac MacNabb.
“I wanted this album to be a homage to the great blues artists who inspired me", he explained, and that's exactly what it is, an exciting collection of horn-filled R'n'B-flavored covers.

Special Austria : Hooked On Blues - I Have To Stop (feat. Bonnie Lee, Magic Slim, John Primer, Nick Holt) (1994) / Austrian Blues Summit (1998)

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Hooked On Blues - I Have To Stop (1994)

The little Austrian band that hooked... Magic Slim

There is in Austria a nice little label launched in 1974 by a blues fan, Hannes Folterbauer, who managed to sign some good blues artist from Chicago like Eddie Taylor Jr., Vance Kelly, Magic Slim and his Teardrops, John Primer after he left the Teardrops, and "the Sweetheart of the Blues" aka singer Bonnie Lee.

Meanwhile in Austria a bunch of young blues crazies formed a band baptized Hooked On Blues. A few years later, Magic Slim was in Austria for some concerts and happened to hear them perform. He was so impressed by their understanding of Chicago blues that he advised Wolf to make them record, and consequently Wolf organized a first session. When Magic Slim came back to Austria with the Teardrops (which was featuring John Primer on guitar, and Slim's brother Nick Holt on bass), Wolf set another session, this time including Slim, Holt, Primer and Bonnie Lee.

Samuel James - For Rosa, Maeve And Noreen (2009) + “Songs Famed for Sorrow and Joy” (2008)

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Astonishing !

There's the famous elders Skip, Elmore and “Homesick”, the late Steve, the younger Colin, Dicky, Seth, Nathan and Julian. Now there's Samuel. Samuel James, multi string-instrument player (all kinds of guitars and banjos, piano), harmonicist, foot-stomper and hand-clapper, acoustic roots and blues performer, singer, songwriter, storyteller. And an amazing phenom on stage.

Totally possessed by his music, he strums or rather slams and slaps his resonator guitar so hard that it's a miracle the strings survive each song, knocks the beat on the body, and is unable to stay on his seat, suddenly lifting up his right leg as if he'd been stung by a bee, sometimes throwing both legs in all directions like an octopus, or playing his instrument in all kind of positions, all that while singing his succulent stories with a powerful rasping voice ! Just watch some of the videos listed below, you won't believe it !

Roland Tchakounté - Nguémé & Smiling Blues (2015)

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“The DNA of the blues is African”

From the beginning of his career, and his revelation in 1999 at the Blues-sur-Seine Festival near Paris, Roland Tchakounté, the Cameroonian “griot” relocated in France, is taking the American blues to re-encounter its historical African roots. “The DNA of the blues is African”, he affirms.

Converted to blues the day he heard John Lee Hooker in his country, he did with blues what his fellow Cameroonian musician, the late jazz-funk saxophonist Manu Dibango, had done with makossa, a popular rhythmic musical style from Cameroon, that he infused with jazz.

The Meters - Good Old Funky Music (rel. in 1990)

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Good ol' funky Meters

The complicated history of the Meters. This band is a big paradox : despite their legendary reputation as musical innovators, “inventors” the New Orleans funk style (also baptized “second line funk” or “bayou funk”), and extraordinary live act, and although they recorded hit songs, they never managed to establish themselves as a mainstream group.

Formed in 1965, The Meters developed a brilliant combination of tight melodic grooves and syncopated New Orleans "second line" rhythms highly charged with the organ, guitar, bass and drums each weaving lines trading off melody and rhythm roles seamlessly.

Pinetop Perkins - Back On Top (2000)

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Top boogie legend

“Pinetop” was 86 or 87 when he recorded this superb album featuring some staples from his repertoire.
Born in July 1913 in Belzoni, Mississippi, Joseph William Perkins became the legendary pianist we know by accident : originally playing guitar, his left arm tendons were badly injured in a knife fight in Helena, Arkansas, in the 1940s. Unable to play guitar anymore, he could have given up music definitely. But Mr Perkins is an obstinate man who loved playing music so much that instead of that he switched to piano ! I don't know if he was a good guitarist or not, but his lucky star decided differently, for the best as far as we are concerned.

Lowell Fulson (updated) : The Ol' Blues Singer (1975), One More Blues (rec. 1984, rel. 1999), Them Update Blues (1995)

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Full sound !

Though Lowell Fulson might be less famous than other post-war bluesmen, especially from Chicago, he was the innovative king of West Coast blues. A man with flair : in the early 1940s he spotted two promising musicians and took them in his band : a pianist named Ray Charles and saxophonist Stanley Turrentine. He wrote and recorded famous classics like "3 O'Clock Blues" in 1946, which became B.B. King's first hit in 1951, the immortal "Every Day I Have the Blues" (adapted from Memphis Slim's "Nobody Loves Me"), "Reconsider Baby" in 1954, which became a blues standard, notably covered by Elvis Presley in 1960.
He also co-wrote "Tramp" with Jimmy McCracklin in 1967, a song covered only a few months later by the duet Otis Redding-Carla Thomas, or “Black Nights” with Fats Washington, a hit released in 1965. No need to pursue further to understand the man's importance in the blues landscape.

Special Buddy Guy : The Complete Vanguard Recordings (This Is Buddy Guy, 1968; A Man And The Blues,1968; Hold That Plane, 1972) (2000) + Buddy's Baddest : The Best Of Buddy Guy (1999)

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My buddy is a great guy

Until he signed with Silvertone Records in the early 1990s, Buddy Guy had wandered from one label to the other after he left Chess in 1967, except a few years with Vanguard during which he recorded three excellent albums which were released in the late 1960s-early 1970s. Those have been re-issued in a single box-set in 2000, a year after Silvertone released “Buddy's Baddest : The Best Of Buddy Guy”.

A few words about this blues giant in addition to the little bio featured below. First, let's say once and for all that Buddy Guy is not only a unique guitarist, he's also one of the greatest blues singers, and one shouldn't dissociate one from the other, that's what made him a legend.