Jazzman Blues

Modern electric blues guitar can be traced directly back to this Texas-born pioneer, who began amplifying his sumptuous lead lines for public consumption circa 1940 and thus initiated a revolution so total that its tremors are still being felt today. Few major postwar blues guitarists come to mind that don't owe T-Bone Walker an unpayable debt of gratitude. B.B. King has long cited him as a primary influence, marveling at Walker's penchant for holding the body of his guitar outward while he played it. Gatemouth Brown, Pee Wee Crayton, Goree Carter, Pete Mayes, and a wealth of other prominent Texas-bred axemen came stylistically right out of Walker during the late '40s and early '50s.

Bill Frisell - Blues Dream (2001) {Nonesuch}
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© 2001 Warner / Nonesuch Records | 7559-79615-2
Jazz / Post Bop / Modern Creative / Guitar

BLUES DREAM is another in a series of guitarist Bill Frisell's painterly, roots-inflected explorations of American music. Here, Frisell is joined by a horn section which includes trumpeter Ron Miles and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes (of the Jazz Passengers), and the sound of hard brass in the mix crisply offsets his idiosyncratic, bent-note, impresssionistic techniques. Actually, the guitarist gets off more than a few rock-licks on the R&B jam "Ron Carter," a tribute to the bassist that, interestingly, sounds nothing like the elder jazzman's own music.

March 2013, Stanstead Qc – Just in time for the 2013 Blues & Jazz Festival season, Mike Goudreau is launching his 15th album, “Time For Messin’ Around”, comprising 11 songs with 8 new compositions and 3 covers from the Eastern Townships blues and jazzman. Says Goudreau: “We’ve got something here that might surprise blues fans old and new!” For the occasion, Goudreau is accompanied by long-time cronies Jonathan-Guillaume Boudreau on bass, Jean-François Bégin on drums, and the saxophonist David Élias on one song. Also appearing as special guest is Pascal “Per’’ Veillette, a very unique and talented harmonicist who brings a particular exotic flair with his participation on two songs. For “Time For Messin’ Around”, Goudreau goes back to the “roots’’ approach as he did on his 2006 album “The Grass Ain’t Greener”.

Many improvisers would agree that having the feeling of the blues is a crucial part of jazz expression; however, the jazz and blues worlds don't interact nearly as often as they should. There are jazz musicians who will play Miles Davis' "All Blues" or Charlie Parker's "Parker's Mood" on a regular basis but wouldn't know John Lee Hooker from Little Milton; there are blues artists who are much more likely to work with a rock musician than a jazz musician. So it is a rare treat to hear a blues-oriented guitarist and a jazz-oriented guitarist co-leading a session, which is exactly what happens on More Conversations in Swing Guitar. This 2003 release is a sequel to bluesman Duke Robillard and jazzman Herb Ellis' 1999 encounter Conversations in Swing Guitar, and the CD proves that good things can happen when jazz and blues players interact. More Conversations in Swing Guitar is an album of very blues-minded instrumental jazz – it's hardly a carbon copy of Robillard's work with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, but the bluesman has no problem appearing in a jazz-oriented setting.

Van Morrison - Roll With The Punches (2017) {Caroline Records-Exile Productions 2557718515} (Complete Artwork)
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© 2017 Caroline Records / Exile Productions 2557718515
Rock / Blues / Modern Electric Blues / Blue-Eyed Soul / Folk-Rock / Soft Rock

Van Morrison's 2016 album Keep Me Singing included the hard blues track "Goin' Down to Bangor," a tune that directly foreshadowed Roll with the Punches, a set of five originals and ten covers drenched in Chicago-style blues. He also heavily engages in collaboration here with appearances by Jeff Beck, Chris Farlowe, Jason Rebello, Paul Jones, and Georgie Fame.

For Otis Taylor's new release, Mato Nanji from Indigenous, joins him on six of the tracks. In addition to adding his dynamic guitar playing to the songs, Nanji joins in on vocals a first for Otis Taylor albums. My World Is Gone features Taylor's trance-like reflections on subjects of social injustice, including the early injustices of the Native-American plight.

When an album boasts Robben Ford on lead vocals and guitar and Jimmy Haslip on electric bass, one tends to assume that there will be some type of jazz influence. Haslip, after all, was a founding member of the Yellowjackets back in 1981 and was still with the group 29 years later in early 2010, while the eclectic Ford has a long history of excelling as both a blues-rocker and a jazzman. It turns out that jazz is, in fact, an influence on parts of Renegade Creation, which unites Haslip and Ford with Michael Landau (lead vocals, guitar) and Gary Novak (drums). Jazz isn't a huge influence on this 2010 release, but it is an influence. More than anything, however, Renegade Creation is an album of blues-rock and decidedly bluesy hard rock.