Past Programs
Blues - 2008
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Amos Lee
19/11/2008
CD of the Week - Taj Mahal
17/11/2008
40 years as a significant figure in the diverse worlds of blues, soul, reggae and world music is no mean feat, and rather than just compiling a greatest hits retrospective, Taj Mahal has celebrated this milestone by putting out a brand new album Maestro.
In keeping with recent trends, he has decided to include many tracks which are collaborations, and so has joined up with a very fine list of well-known acts for this record, including Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Toumani Diabate, Angelique Kidjo, Los Lobos and Ziggy Marley. As you’d expect, the result is a CD which covers everything from hard-edged blues through reggae and soul to West African sounds.
Irma Thomas (First Broadcast on 8/5/2006)
25/09/2008
Irma Thomas’ new CD After The Rain showcases her wonderfully warm New Orleans soul voice in a new way, with great songs and sympathetic, mostly acoustic backing.
Reported missing during Katrina, she was actually playing a gig in Austin Texas at the time and returned home to find her house flooded. Even though the songs for After The Rain were chosen before Katrina, they resonate eerily with the disaster. It’s the first CD in 6 years for the singer who has been recording for 46 years and is known for having hits on Time is on My Side and Ruler of My Heart. Producer Scott Billington said that ‘Irma has one of the richest and most beautiful voices in contemporary music. It seemed confining at this stage of her career to make a straight R&B record, so we broke the mold.’ Irma is joined by some great players - Sonny Landreth, Corey Harris and Dirk Powell among them.
David Bromberg Quartet
27/08/2008
Newly remastered and now widely available, David Bromberg Quartet’s Live New York City 1982 captures Bromberg and a red hot acoustic band playing and singing a typically eclectic mix of Appalachian music, Blues, Western Swing and Gospel.
David and his band are obviously having a good time at this concert (at a well known concert hall whose name can’t be used in the packaging or advertising). His guitar pushes its limits on a 10-minute fiddle tune medley and the audience is totally simpatico. We’ll also hear tracks from Bromberg’s recent CD Try Me One More Time, his first studio album since 1990.
Two-Faced Friday
22/08/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Buddy Guy
19/08/2008
Buddy Guy says of his new CD, Skin Deep, that it’s ‘The first time I really had more control.’ It shows - his singing and his guitar work are full of inspired abandon.
‘Everything in here is new’, Buddy said, ‘Most of the other albums have been a few new songs and then back to the older stuff or the covers.’ Buddy’s sound is loud and aggressive as he plays a selection of vintage guitars backed by a tight blues band with Eric Clapton, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi and pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph appearing as guests.
Two-Faced Friday
15/08/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Roomful of Blues
12/08/2008
The loss of three members (including the on-tour death of long-time trumpeter Bob Enos) hasn’t adversely affected 41-year old jump blues band Roomful of Blues. Instead, their latest CD, Raisin’ a Ruckus, is full of energy and new direction.
60-year-old Enos had been with the band for 28 years when he died of a heart attack in his hotel room while the band was touring in Florida, a week before the album’s release. The band has yet to replace him and they still set up his microphone and trumpet stand when they play. For over 40 years Roomful has been a revolving door for musicians who love horn-driven blues and swing, and they have landed on their feet again with the recruitment of a new bassist and drummer and tough-voiced singer Dave Howard who brings a Louisiana flavour to this album. The band that Count Basie called ‘the hottest blues band I’ve ever heard’ is now vying with the Count in the longevity and rejuvenation stakes.
Two-Faced Friday
08/08/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Janiva Magness
05/08/2008
Janiva Magness lost both her parents to suicide and grew up on the streets and in foster homes until she found her salvation in the power of the blues. She calls her latest CD What Love Will Do, ‘a testament to the power of love’. Her commanding, totally committed voice drives a band that cleverly blurs the lines between soul music and rootsy blues.
Jeff Turmes’ guitar, bass and saxophones and Stephen Hodges’ fat drums lay down great grooves as Detroit-born Janiva radically reinvents songs previously done by Al Green, Annie Lennox, Bill Withers and Marvin Gaye with her hard-edged sound of hope. Her turning point was seeing Chicago West Side Bluesman Otis Rush perform in Minneapolis; she said: ‘Everything he played was with such complete commitment. I knew when I left that club that morning in the wee hours that whatever it was that happened to me that night, I had to have more of that experience.’
CD of the Week - Les Amazones de Guinée
28/07/2008
Unlike scores of ‘girl groups’ put together to make a quick buck, Les Amazones de Guinée are the real thing - an all-female band who are all members of Guinea’s Military Police Force and who have been making great music since their formation in 1961.
Guinea’s first president after independence in 1958, Ahmed Sekou Touré, saw culture as an essential weapon to cut across tribalism, heal colonial wounds and forge a national identity. Along with scores of other musical groups that were instrumental in forging a new West African music, he formed L’Orchestre Féminin de la Gendarmerie de Guinée.
Originally an acoustic band, they added electric guitars, drum kit, sax and horns in 1965 and later abandoned their military khaki for colourful traditional Guinean clothes and began touring internationally. They recorded their first album in Paris in 1982. Sekou Touré’s death in 1984 all but killed Guinea’s music industry. The Amazones did better than most, continuing to play around West Africa as a working band in the army, but tours outside the continent were no longer an option.
A new studio in Bamako, Mali, and the interest of Paris-based producer Ibrahima Sylla sparked their return to recording after a 25-year lapse. Led by bassist Commandant Salématou Diallo (who is actually the head of a 650-soldier camp), the group hopped in a minibus and made the difficult journey along muddy roads from Conakry to Bamako to record their spirited and inspiring CD Wamato. Although death and retirement have left them with only five original members, the group is strong and tight, with some great guest vocals from Aminata Kamissoko and a set of songs that celebrate Africa and womanhood.
CD of the Week - Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis
21/07/2008
Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis may come from two different corners of the record store, but when they came together for two days of concerts in New York, that became their CD Two Men and the Blues, they brought out the best in each other.
Willie’s relaxed vocal and guitar phrasing and his instantly recognisable sound contrasts and merges with Wynton and his band’s sharp, cheeky, big city take on this selection of blues, jazz, country and gospel tunes. As Ben Ratliff said in his review of the CD for The New York Times, the hidden inspiration of the album is Louis Armstrong, who did a similar thing in his duets with early country performer Jimmie Rodgers in 1930 and whose deceptively simple trumpet improvisations are the cornerstone of Marsalis’ style. On this CD, Willie, Wynton and their band members follow Louis' lead in eluding ‘American stereotypes of country, city, blues, jazz, race, class humour and sadness.’
Dazibao
08/07/2008
Alma, the debut CD of Belgian two accordion, percussion and oud or flamenco guitar instrumental group Dazibao, shines sunnily as it journeys between North African, Musette and flamenco sounds.
Young accordionist Sophie Cavez, a mainstay of the Belgian and French folk music scenes, wrote most of the pieces on the album. No accordion jokes, please.
Dr. John and the Lower 911
02/07/2008
Dr. John, the voice of New Orleans, has found another meaning in his hometown’s party-town monicker, The City That Care Forgot, the title of his angry and straightforward album that firmly points the blame for Katrina and its aftermath on corporate greed and government collusion.
Recorded with his funky trio, the Lower 911, with cameos from Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson and Terence Blanchard, every song (5 of them co-written with fellow Louisiana exile, the great Bobby Charles) addresses a different aspect of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, from the wetlands development that made the impact worse to the ineffectuality of the government’s response. He also sings about the individual stories - the sorrow and suicides that followed the endless wrangling with insurance companies and agencies to try to get re-established in the city. As he says in his Nawlins patois, ‘Short version is, we getting’ mad!’
John Hiatt
11/06/2008
Although he’s been recording for 34 years, Same Old Man is John Hiatt’s first album of all love songs.
With the North Mississippi Allstars’ Luther Dickinson on guitars and mandolins, and longtime occasional Hiatt colleague Kenneth Blevins on drums, John ranges from un-ironic heartfelt songs to whimsical ones with lines like, ‘I’d rather be in a barrel of salt and pickle brine with a 1000 papercuts’. He’s definitely looking back, with a song about the characters he met in his early days and vocal performances that resemble Dylan, latter-day Dylan at that.
Pinetop Perkins
10/06/2008
At the age of 94 Pinetop Perkins, for many years Muddy Waters’ pianist, has made a fine blues album - Pinetop Perkins and Friends. The friends include fellow Mississippian Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and Jimmie Vaughan of the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
Pinetop first played with Robert Nighthawk and Sonny Boy Williamson then, in the 1990s, with B.B. King and Earl Hooker before joining Muddy after Otis Spann’s departure. In 1995 Pinetop struck out on his own for the first time with a series of albums and won so many W.C. Handy awards that the blues piano category was named after him so someone else could have a shot at winning it. Pinetop is now based in Austin, Texas (having found Chicago to be too cold), where I saw him a couple of years ago holding court at the Broken Spoke, a country and western dancehall. Several generations of bluesmen play with him on this album, including talented young Eric Sardinas.
CD of the Week - Eddy ‘The Chief’ Clearwater
09/06/2008
Produced by younger-generation guitarist Ronnie Baker Brooks, Bluesman Eddy ‘The Chief’ Clearwater’s new CD, West Side Strut, is the record he’s been meant to make for years.
Eddy says that if you worked on the West Side (of Chicago), you had to have a lot of energy. That’s why he was drawn to the powerful, soul tinged and often minor-key blues of West-Siders like Magic Sam and Luther Allison. Ronnie Baker Brooks adds to the power with his solid production and in-your-face guitar work on this CD of Eddy’s originals and one Lowell Fulson song that takes us through a variety of strong blues grooves.
Two-Faced Friday
06/06/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Catherine Russell
04/06/2008
On Sentimental Streak, singer Catherine Russell, the daughter of Luis Russell, Louis Armstrong’s pianist, arranger and musical director from 1935, revisits a stack of songs from the heyday of the Blues Mamas, firing them up with a great crew of NYC’s finest, led by ace producer Larry Campbell.
Matt Munisteri’s guitar, Mark Shane’s piano and Steven Bernstein’s horn arrangements are particularly alive and true to period in this album that covers songs recorded by Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Nellie Lutcher, Pearl Bailey and Frank Sinatra. Wait a minute, did I say ‘Frank Sinatra’?
Jeff Lang Guest Presenter
14/05/2008
Today Jeff Lang is our guest presenter so he’ll be choosing the music for The Daily Planet and explaining how it has influenced him and his great new CD, Half Seas Over.
Some of the artists Jeff has put on his eclectic short list are Richard Thompson, Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder, Jim Moray, John Fahey, Bill Frisell, Leo Kottke, Bonnie Prince Billy, AC/DC and Hound Dog Taylor.
Van Morrison
30/04/2008
Van Morrison may not be offering much new on his 33rd studio album, Keep it Simple, but the clarity of the production, the band’s tasteful playing and his unique, still strong voice carry it over the line.
Interestingly, its debut at #10 on the Billboard charts made it Van’s highest ever US chart position of any Morrison album. Long time Morrison sidekick, Bay Area keyboard man John Allair, shines on the organ and the album features two female steel guitarists - Sarah Jory and Cindy Cashdollar. Van wrote all the songs and, although his writing seems lazy at times and his curmudgeonly attitude despite his success sours some songs, one wonders what one would think if this were his first album - a great discovery, perhaps?
Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters
28/01/2008
Ronnie Earl, ‘the heart with hands’, is a master of expressing deep emotions in his blues instrumentals, and he’s at the top of his form on his live CD, Hope Radio.
Whether he’s playing gospel, West Side Chicago, Howling Wolf or any number of blues styles, Ronnie’s sure and clean-toned guitar takes us from a scream to a whisper to a scream with a fine band playing in front of a live audience.
