Ella Fitzgerald - 1961-62 Twelve Nights In Hollywood, Vol. 1 to 4 (2010) [update now including vol. 3 & 4]

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Ella, the jazz diva

The first words she utters are “Thank you… thank you… thank you very much ladies and gentlemen!” Generally she thanks her enthusiastically applauding audience three times with her strange juvenile voice, occasionally exchanging a few humorous words with the public before engaging into a next title. A kind of ritual.
But she's not a girl anymore on this double live album, she's a buxom 44 jazz diva almost at the peak of her career.

Willie Pooch & Cadillac Zack - The Blues Do Something To Me (2004)

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The pooch in the Cadillac

Here a nice little album by two enjoyable musicians : the veteran Willie Pooch, Columbus "Godfather of Blues", holds the mike; the younger Cadillac Zack produces and takes on the lead guitar.

Boston born Zack Slovinsky aka Cadillac Zack didn't play guitar seriously before he was 19. Two years later, he moved to Chicago to study cinema at the university. There he spent lots of nights hanging around the West and South sides blues clubs and met Magic Slim and above all John Primer who took him under his wing and became his model. He is proud to say he plays the West Side style of the legendary Magic Sam. Luck had him meeting somebody who had played with Magic Sam : Willie Pooch.

Lee Pons - Big Boogie Voodoo (2010)

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Naw'lins boogie man

The cover shows an old beaten dusty piano that takes you back to old New Orleans keyboard kings like Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe aka Jelly Roll Morton, William Thomas Duprée aka Champion Jack Dupree, Antoine Dominique Domino aka Fats Domino, Huey Pierce Smith aka Huey "Piano" Smith, Henry "Roy" Byrd aka Professor Longhair, or more recently James Carroll Booker III aka Little Booker aka James Booker and Malcolm John Rebennack aka Dr John. All from New Orleans and all playing a pivotal instrument of New Orleans blues : piano.

Lee Pons belongs to that long tradition : “It’s a tradition that came from the birth of blues, in the lumber and turpentine camps of the Delta to the parlors and juke joints. There was a time when the piano was the only instrument, besides the voice, in blues. It was king !”, he explained in an interview on American Blues Scene.

R.I.P. Tina Turner

 R.I.P. Tina

 Tina Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26th, 1939 in Nutbush, Tennessee, died today,
May 24th, 2023. She was 83.

Buddy Flett - Rough Edges (2013)

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Vibrations from the soul

A vibrato voice directly plugged to the soul, a guitar drowned in a sea (a Mississippi sea of course*) of reverberation, a rhythmic atmosphere darkened by a foot stomping on the pedal of a hypnotic bass drum…, the opening track “Train” foresees the best for the next eleven tracks of this outstanding, intense and very personal album.

Buddy Flett (born Bruce Mechlin Flett in 1951) is a survivor : he spent several years recovering from a nasty viral encephalitis which required a medically-induced coma followed by a month-long intensive rehabilitation in hospital. He contracted the virus while on a blues cruise playing with the famous Mississippi-Arkansas bluesman Hubert Sumlin (1931-2011), his master, his mentor, his friend, himself mentored by the legendary Howlin' Wolf during the two decades spent as his first guitarist…

Special Bruce Katz : Bruce Katz Band - Crescent Crawl (1992), Mississippi Moan (1997), Three Feet Off The Ground (2000), Homecoming (2014), Bruce Katz - Solo Ride (2019)

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Black Katz Bone

Almost every music aficionado knows about Jazz-fusion, a new hybrid form of jazz developed by the musicians who accompanied Miles Davis on his legendary innovative album “Bitches Brew” in 1969. It was then called “jazz rock” and rushed like a tsunami through the 1970s. Similarly, the mix of blues with rock logically became the blues-rock genre. Another tsunami.
Well, Bruce Katz invented Blues-fusion, an original style of bluesified jazz or jazzified blues : soul and funk Hammond B-3 organ jazz à la Jimmy Smith, retro stride piano style, explosive boogie-woogie and swing…

Ronnie Earl, Pinetop Perkins, Calvin “Fuzz” Jones & Willie “Big Eyes” Smith - Eye To Eye (1996)

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Chicago blues magic

The album could have been titled “Ronnie Earl meets Pinetop Perkins” or the opposite, as the two musicians dominate the album, the great Perkins on piano and singing, the magnificent Earl on guitar. No matter, these 13 tracks produced by Earl are superb pieces of classic Chicago blues of the best kind, featuring three of the best former members of the Muddy Waters' band.

Drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith was the first to join Muddy Waters in 1961, followed by Perkins who took over Otis Spann's seat behind the piano in 1969, and by bassist Calvin “Fuzz” Jones who got on board in 1970 (his real nickname would be originally “Fuzz Box”). Perkins, Jones and Smith backed Waters for many years before leaving to form the Legendary Blues Band in June 1980 with harmonicist Jerry Portnoy.

Jimmy Witherspoon with The Duke Robillard Band (rec.1995, rel. 2000)

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Spoonful

This is supposed to be Witherspoon aka “Spoon” last recording and many critics apparently underrated it on the account of his being under his usual vocal level. Nevertheless the album is a triple treat featuring blues crooner Spoon of course, Robillard and… Sax Gordon !

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.

Lonnie Brooks - Live From Chicago : Bayou Lightning Strikes (1988)

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Brooks' groove

Chicago is like Hollywood. Most of the Chicago blues musicians were “immigrants” native of the Deep South states. Lonnie Brooks was no exception. The Louisiana born Texas blues slinger, the bayou lightning man, migrated to Chicago in 1960, bringing with him his energetic mix of Southeast Texas and Louisiana swamp blues and rock'n'roll (honed in particular in Clifton Chenier's band in the 1950s), and… his iconic Stetson cowboy hat. Logically he signed with Alligator Records that certainly reminded him his native swamp country.

Fenton Robinson - Somebody Loan Me A Dime (1974, 1990)

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Robinson's mellow… dic blues

I generally don't pay much attention to the laudatory praises about any album by the musical critics establishment, as those mentioned in the presentation doc; all I'm interested in is what kind of feeling a song, an album or an artist are giving me. It's not an intellectual matter; it's something closer to animal instinctive behavior (1). And the fact is that Robinson's blues feels me with a groovy spirit.