George Benson Walking to New Orleans

George Benson gets back to Americana basics on Walking to New Orleans, the jazz guitar legend's double-barreled tribute to both piano-pounding hit machine Fats Domino and the original rock guitar hero and poet, Chuck Berry. Walking To New Orleans is out on April 26, 2019 on Mascot Label Group/Provogue Records. The album toggles between tracks written and/or recorded by Berry and Domino as though Benson were moderating a musical conversation between Missouri and Louisiana. It kicks off with a rock-solid rendition of Berry's 1964 post-incarceration story song "Nadine (Is It You?)," which Benson makes his own by scatting in unison with his guitar solo.

George Benson gets back to Americana basics on Walking to New Orleans, the jazz guitar legend's double-barreled tribute to both piano-pounding hit machine Fats Domino and the original rock guitar hero and poet, Chuck Berry. Walking To New Orleans is out on April 26, 2019 on Mascot Label Group/Provogue Records.

George Benson gets back to Americana basics on Walking to New Orleans, the jazz guitar legend's tribute to both piano-pounding hit machine Fats Domino and the original rock guitar hero and poet, Chuck Berry. Walking to New Orleans is Benson's first recording since 2013's Inspiration: A Tribute to Nat King Cole, but it couldn’t be more different. Where Benson embellished Cole's cool tunes with lush orchestral arrangements, Walking to New Orleans came about by hunkering down in a Music Row studio, with a quartet of first-call Nashville cats. This is Benson's 45th album, and few sound as loose-limbed and flat-out fun.

"When I listen to these records now… when I listen to the Pershing, it's phenomenal, I must say. What they were doing, phenomenal, the lines and the purity. It's so pure … It was sheer joy working with these two individuals. Master musicians," writes pianist/bandleader Ahmad Jamal in the liner notes to this collection. If there ever was a subject worthy of a Mosaic box set, Jamal is it. For six decades, he has been, for several reasons, one of the most enduring and identifiable artists in jazz, or, as he prefers to describe it, "American classic music." First, there is his sound: a breathtaking amalgam of Erroll Garner's pithy touch, Nat "King" Cole's intricate horn-like, pre-bop lines, and Art Tatum's Mephistophelean technique.