Walter Trout In Session

No ordinary artist. No ordinary covers album. From the day he conceived the project to the moment he counted off the first song in the studio, Walter Trout had a bolder plan for Survivor Blues. "I'm riding in my car sometimes," says the US blues titan. "I've got a blues station on – and here's another band doing Got My Mojo Workin'. And there's a little voice in me that says, 'Does the world need another version of that song?' So I came up with an idea. I didn't want to do Stormy Monday or Messin' With The Kid. I didn't want to do the blues greatest hits. I wanted to do old, obscure songs that have hardly been covered. And that's how Survivor Blues started…"

No ordinary artist. No ordinary covers album. From the day he conceived the project to the moment he counted off the first song in the studio, Walter Trout had a bolder plan for Survivor Blues. "I'm riding in my car sometimes," says the US blues titan. "I've got a blues station on – and here's another band doing Got My Mojo Workin'. And there's a little voice in me that says, 'Does the world need another version of that song?' So I came up with an idea. I didn't want to do Stormy Monday or Messin' With The Kid. I didn't want to do the blues greatest hits. I wanted to do old, obscure songs that have hardly been covered. And that's how Survivor Blues started…"

Albums that combine live and studio tracks can, in some cases, be inconsistent. Some artists are so reliant on studio technology that they fall apart in a live setting; they sound stiff and awkward the minute they take the stage. And on the other hand, some artists are so fond of playing live that they become inhibited in the studio. But there is nothing inconsistent or uneven about Walter Trout's debut album, Life in the Jungle, a collection of live and studio recordings from 1989; on this release, the blues-rocker is as focused and inspired on-stage as he is in the studio. All of the tracks were recorded in Scandinavian countries; the live performances are from an appearance at the Midtfyn Festival in Denmark on July 2, 1989, while the studio material is from a session in Stockholm, Sweden, on June 21 and July 9 of that year.

A hard-luck blues band of the '60s, Canned Heat was founded by blues historians and record collectors Alan Wilson and Bob Hite. They seemed to be on the right track and played all the right festivals (including Monterey and Woodstock, making it very prominently into the documentaries about both) but somehow never found a lasting audience.

When Island Records released Chicago Line in 1988, they were picking up an existing recording for U.S. distribution. A Sense Of Place, on the other hand, represents John Mayall's full-fledged return to major-label record-making, with all the good and bad things that implies, from a high-profile producer, R.S. Field, to the introduction of such cover material as Wilbert Harrison's "Let's Work Together" and J.J. Cale's "Sensitive Kind." Mayall's Bluesbreakers seem to have been fragmenting at this point – guitarist Walter Trout is gone, bassist Bobby Haynes is replaced on most tracks by Freebo, a veteran who worked for years with Bonnie Raitt, and Sonny Landreth is now credited as "guest slide guitarist."