Few sounds express musical passion better than the cry of a bent guitar string sustaining a single note. It can tickle the spine like the howl of a lone wolf on a dark prairie, and seem just as chilling and lonesome.
In the world of blues guitar, how that note is squeezed is one of the qualities that distinguish the alpha wolves from the rest of the pack. And new albums by Ronnie Earl, Joe Bonamassa, Luther Allison, and Mike Welch, all masters of the modern blues fretboard, capture their distinctive voices at full bay. There’s also a notable wild card entry by modern chitlin circuit king Bobby Rush that’s the most raw and playful blues album to come out of Mississippi in a decade.
Here’s the scoop:
Joe Bonamassa, Sloe Gin (J&R Adventures): This hot-rodder from Utica, New York, used to go by “Smokin’” Joe Bonamassa back when he was too young to smoke. At age 12 he was opening shows for B.B. King and Buddy Guy. As a teen in the early ’90s he formed the musically undistinguished group Bloodlines along with Berry Oakley, Jr., (son of the Allman Brothers’ bassist), Miles Davis’ son Erin, and Doors guitarist Robby Kreiger’s son Waylon.
In 2000 Bonamassa went solo and quit his “Smokin’,” and his sound’s been healthier ever since. On Sloe Gin, the sixth disc under his own name, he hits full artistic stride. This is an elegant and brawny guitar hero album, diverse—with its mix of electric and acoustic performances, stone blues, and granite-hard rock—and bolstered by fine songwriting from Chris Whitley, Alvin Lee, Paul Rodgers and Mick Ralphs, Charles Brown, John Mayall, and Bonamassa himself.
“India” is a sitar-like workout played on a National Triolian, a vintage resonator guitar, but Bonamassa’s ’59 Les Paul Vintage Original Spec, 1959 ES-345, and gorgeous maple- and ebony-fretboarded Hummingbird acoustic form the album’s ramrod backbone.
“One of These Days” is a freedom song that speaks a brash language of grinding power chords and braying slide. And “Sloe Gin,” a potentially wimpy ballad written by Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen, unreels as a raucous essay in heartache thanks to Bonamassa’s explosive guitar accents. His reading of Whitley’s “Ball Peen Hammer” even captures its late author’s intensity, which is no easy feat. Right now, there’s no better blues-rock artist than Bonamassa.
Click here to download a free MP3 of Joe Bonamassa’s “Dirt in My Pocket.”
Ronnie Earl, Hope Radio (Stony Plain): When it comes to taste and tone, this Stratocaster master is unbeatable. Especially live, as he’s recorded here before a studio audience at Wellspring Sound in Acton, Massachusetts last year.
Earl came up in jump blues outfit Roomful of Blues, but during his past 20 years as a solo artist he’s been increasingly free ranging. His early discs showcase vocalists, including ex-Muddy Waters harpman Jerry Portnoy and fellow Roomful alumnus Sugar Ray Norcia, as much as his own Chicago- and Texas-style prowess, which is bookended by his influences Hubert Sumlin and T-Bone Walker.
In 1994 Earl cut out the middlemen. His Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters became the first all-instrumental guitar-driven outfit in the genre. The group’s sound was captured in bloom on the aptly titled Language of the Soul. After the astounding, energized follow-up, 1995’s Blues Guitar Virtuoso Live in Europe, summarized the traditional aspects of his pure blues playing, Earl began another evolution in part encouraged by his friend Carlos Santana.
Today he’s one of the most interesting and soulful guitar fusionists in the game, fitting old school and modern jazz, pop song melodies, Latin rhythms, and textural licks comfortably into his framework. And Hope Radio is a lush summary of his current playing.
Although Earl rarely tours due to an ongoing battle with depression, he is most inspired before an audience. His improvisations in the epic, soaring “Blues for the Homeless” are exquisitely sweet, full of delicately plucked melodies that shimmer with seemingly effortless precision. Wes Montgomery, another cornerstone of Earl’s playing, gets a nod in the graceful octave chords and tune of “Beautiful Child.” And when he reaches back into blues history, it’s with respect for the present. Hope Radio’s two full-blooded invocations of the past, the Sumlin tribute “Wolf Dance” and “Blues for Otis Rush,” incorporate the signatures of those two classic musicians—slippery string sliding, sweeping extended chords, swooning bends—but are colored by Earl’s own gritty, contemporary sonic twists: idiosyncratic partial bends, staccato repetitions, twisting scalar runs. It all amounts to one of 2007’s finest guitar albums.
Click here to download a free MP3 of Ronnie Earl's "Eddie's Gospel Groove."
Luther Allison, Underground (Ruf): This CD’s a ride in Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine with the dials set to Chicago 1958. That year, 18-year-old Allison entered the studio with Bobby Rush as producer to cut his first solo album. The sessions were brash and bristling with energy—full of the vitality that would eventually make Allison a star—and when it was over, the tapes sat on a shelf in his wife’s home until now.
In the ensuing 50 years Allison slowly worked his way to nearly the apex of the blues, only to die from cancer at the height of his popularity in 1997. But he remains an iconic figure, known for coaxing pyrotechnics from his fleet of Les Pauls during typically three-to four-hour concerts. Allison once told a reporter that after he died he wanted to be known as a “100-percent giver,” and he is.
What’s particularly amazing about Underground is how present the rudiments of Allison’s greatness were so early in his career, when he was a green kid in Rush’s Windy City band. His intense, keening voice and blustery guitar are already transfixing. Plus his tone on half the disc sounds nearly a decade ahead of its time, riding waves of delightfully jagged distortion. Save for the set’s absence of original songs, it’s hard to believe it took him another 32 years to break through.
Allison wails like a lust-driven demon on “Rock Me Baby,” his quivering voice sparring with his Elmore James-like slide attack. And he paces a fence top for a daredevil take on Magic Slim’s “Easy Baby,” singing in a night-cat moan. “Cut You Loose” is such a sophisticated conglomerate of primal funk, ringing single-note leads, and deep note bending that it could be a blueprint for Cream sans the Marshall stacks.
Surprisingly, these tapes were shelved because Allison wasn’t comfortable with his performance. But this was the absolute cutting edge of blues in 1958, and it hasn’t dulled or tarnished much since.
Bobby Rush, Raw (Deep Rush): Allison’s one-time producer Rush is best known today for the sassy R-rated stage shows full of bushy double-entendres and hip-twitching hoochie dancers that made him king of the chitlin circuit. That’s the side of his music he’s explored for most of his 100-odd albums and that was captured on film in “The Road to Memphis” episode of Martin Scorsese’s 2003 PBS series The Blues. But Raw gets back to his roots—just Rush with his own Stratocaster and harmonica.
As it turns out, they make a formidable trio. Rush is an especially adept harmonica player. He was a friend and musical sparring partner of Little Walter on the formative Chicago blues scene of the 1950s and ’60s, and his swooping tones and rhythmic punctuation underscore the lilt of his lightly graveled voice. What’s most surprising about his guitar on Raw is how funky he remains without his churning big band behind him. And even when he makes his guitar spare and stinging during instrumental breaks and numbers like the tribute “Howling Wolf,” Rush’s Open C tuning gives his plucking and strumming an uncommon voice.
Throughout Raw, Rush’s delight in exuberantly bending themes from the Sonny Boy Williamson and Wolf catalogs into his own tunes, in permutations like “School Girl,” booms within his keening singing style and bleach-boned picking. The album’s highlight, however, is its sole serious turn, “How Long,” which articulately and soulfully examines the indelible stain slavery has left on African American culture.
Ultimately, Raw seeks college age listeners. Rush is aiming to build on his TV-heightened profile and fill the gap in the dirty juke joint blues market left by the Fat Possum label’s abandonment of the style in favor of garage rock.
Monster Mike Welch, Just Like It Is: Mike Welch was also a guitar prodigy. At 13 he appeared at the opening of the first House of Blues club in Cambridge, Massachusetts and received the “Monster” moniker from emcee Dan Aykroyd. Within three years he was carving a space for himself in the international blues scene. At 28 he’s already a 15-year stage veteran who’s jammed with Junior Wells, James Cotton, and Johnny Copeland, and recorded with Sugar Ray & the Bluetones, Nick Moss, David Maxwell, and Johnny Winter.
Unlike contemporaries Joe Bonamassa, Jonny Lang, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Welch has stuck close to the bones of pure electric blues rather than seek a mainstream audience. So he’s less known, but, with the exception of Bonamassa, no less a player.
Just Like It Is, Welch’s finest solo album, introduces his new jamming partner: an SG Standard Vintage Original Spec, which gives his fifth solo disc a broader palette than his earlier recordings. He whips his guitar torridly on the meaty licks of “Please” and coaxes it through the album’s swinging opener “She Makes Time.” The SG pulls something fresh out of Welch: a bright, thick ringing tone akin to Freddie King’s. It makes the album’s scalding finale “I Got a Strange Feeling” an absolute barker, full of steely leads played in response to his journeyman singing. For old-time tones and phrasing from a young hand, it’s hard to beat Welch on Just Like It Is.
Click here to download a free MP3 of Mike Welch's "Please."
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