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Chords & Notes
Frank "Son" Seals: The Son Seals Blues Band
Alligator Records, CD, Rs. 475
"FOR A young bluesman to perform his own songs in his own style today is a battle with the immense power of commercial radio and record promotion," wrote blues critic Bruce Iglauer in the liner notes of this album, when it was released by Alligator in 1973. Son Seals was born in Osceola, Mississippi, in August 1942.
His father, Jim Seals, was a musician with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels Show, and taught him the basics of the blues. By age 13, Son was drumming behind Robert Nighthawk and Sonny Boy Williamson, and made the switch to guitar in the mid-'50s because of his association with Earl Hooker. He formed his own band in 1959, and worked the small clubs in the Little Rock, Arkansa, area until 1963. After nearly six years of a peripatetic existence (including tours with Earl Hooker and Albert King), Son settled down in Chicago in 1971, and has been based there ever since.
This debut release was originally an LP, and contains some of Son's classic tracks, like "Your Love is Like a Cancer" and "Sitting at My Window".
Of his original material, laced with its wry humour and searing pathos, the standouts are "Cotton-Picking Blues", "Mother-in-Law Blues" and "Now That I'm Down", and the two tracks mentioned above.
Two out of the 10 tracks are covers, and of these, Son's reworking of Magic Sam's "All Your Love" is noteworthy. Throughout, Son is backed by the sinuous, lean organ work of a premier blues keyboardist of the day — Johnny "Big Moose" Walker (though the remastering of the LP doesn't do much justice to his organ voice).
As I can testify from attending a gig Son once did in Cambridge, Mass., long ago, he is an apostle of the grittiest Chicago electric blues genre, and richly deserves his title — The Hardest Working Bluesman Alive.
Sugar Blue: In Your Eyes
Alligator Records, CD, Rs. 475
EVER WONDER who plays that awesome harmonica in the Rolling Stones' smash hit albums Some Girls, Tattoo You, and Emotional Rescue? No it isn't Mick, he can't hack that level of virtuosity on the harmonica. It's someone Mick calls a "very strange and talented musician", someone the critics have dubbed "the Jimi Hendrix of the harmonica", Sugar Blue. Born James Whiting in 1949, Sugar Blue picked up his moniker from Sugar Blues, a jazz album by Sidney Bechet. Unlike most other bluesmen, he is from New York City, and his early exposure was to the jazz of Billie Holliday and Lester Young, the soul of Ray Charles and Dinah Washington, and the funk of James Brown. All the music that his mother, a singer and dancer at the legendary Apollo Theatre, was into as he was growing up in Harlem, one of the most exciting musical meccas of the late '50s and early '60s.
This eclectic upbringing has stood him well, for, after starting his career as a street musician, he has gone on to collaborate with an array of star artistes from all genres, from jazz and blues, to rock, funk and R&B. He won a Grammy in 1985 for his contribution ("Another Man Done Gone") to the album Blues Explosion, recorded live at Montreux.
After spending several years as a hot act in Paris, Sugar Blue naturally gravitated to the blues capital of the world, Chicago, and has been based there since 1982.
In this, his second album for Alligator, Sugar Blue impresses by drawing upon his entire musical canvas. On "Bluepine" (straight-ahead blues, and my favourite track on this album), he duets with the legendary blues pianist Pinetop Perkins.
On the others, he has a varying collection of sidemen who handle rather unconventional accompaniment for a blues album, such as trumpets, saxophones, flutes, and background vocal harmonies. The title track is a pure R&B number, very much influenced by one of his idols, Stevie Wonder.
It is followed up by "She", which is heavy metal! The satirical "Gucci Gucci Man" is a take-off on Willie Dixon's classic "Hoochie-Coochie Man" and defines, perhaps for the first time in history, the power-drunk yuppie as a blues theme.
The last track, an interpretation of Dixon's "Little Red Rooster", is very innovative.
This album is not quite as heavy on technical virtuosity as some of his earlier ones, but shows him venturing into completely new directions, and therefore makes for rewarding listening.
VISHWAMBHAR PATI
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