Magic

One of the more imposing figures on modern blues scene, guitarist-singer Magic Slim serves up raw, passionate Chicago-style blues with his band The Teardrops on Scufflin’ (Blind Pig 5036; 40:53). Raucous, good-time romps like “Hole In The Wall,” Jimmy Reed’s “Down In Virginia” and Slim’s shuffle “Just Before You Go” sound like just another Saturday night at Florence’s on the South Side. And Slim imbues each tune with nasty licks from his trusty Fender Jazzmaster. Sloppy but powerfully intense, like the spirits of Albert King and Hound Dog Taylor mingling at a juke joint jam.

The Avant Garde was a coffeehouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that played host to a variety of rock, blues, and folk performers in the '60s, and Windy City guitar wizard Magic Sam (aka Sam Maghett) rolled in to play a few sets in June 1968. A local kid with an interest in recording named Jim Charne showed up with a reel-to-reel machine and a couple of microphones, and he captured Magic Sam's show on tape; 45 years later, those tapes have finally been made public on the album Live at the Avant Garde, and given the relatively small amount of material that's surfaced on the late blues legend (who succumbed to a heart attack when he was just 32), this set is a very welcome find. Live at the Avant Garde has a decidedly different feel than Magic Sam Live, which preserved radio broadcasts from 1963 and 1964 and a 1969 appearance at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival; while those recordings blazed with intensity, this captures Magic Sam and his band in more laid-back form, playing a small, booze-free venue rather than a rowdy bar or a festival audience in the thousands.