Gospel Davis

Guy Davis continues to explore the almost forgotten territory of acoustic African-American folk music, field hollers, shouts, rags, and gospel songs in a style that predates the blues and has much in common with the white Appalachian music that existed until the record companies separated it into race and hillbilly music. "Slow Motion Daddy" is a salacious ragtime original with a syncopated rhythm that recalls Rev. Gary Davis and Willie McTell. Davis plays banjo and harmonica and hams it up giving the performance a sly humor. "Follow Me Down" is a 12-string guitar showcase that pays homage to Leadbelly's "Mr. Tom Hughes' Town" a tale of racism and high life in the big city. Nerak Patterson adds electric guitar to a cover of "Hoochie Coochie Man" in an arrangement that crosses the Delta with South Side Chi town. Davis delivers the tune with a growling sexuality and leaves Patterson room for a tasty solo. "Can't Be Satisfied" is another Muddy Waters' tune, this time played claw hammer style on the banjo, with Davis adding harmonica and delivering another playful vocal.

The Levon Helm Band is making more than music in Woodstock, NY nestled in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, they are orchestrating a musical carnival known as The Midnight Ramble. The idea is to recreate, inside Levon Helm Studios, the traveling shows (like F.S. WalcottOs Rabbit Foot Minstrel show) that played in the South where Levon grew up as a boy, embracing the merging musical traditions of the time; blues, gospel, country, rock and roll, bluegrass, rockabilly, soul and jazz. Levon Helm (The Band, R.C.O All-Stars) made a career on stage and screen as a singer, drummer, band leader, writer and actor. He has assembled some of the premiere musicians on the East Coast to take part in the carnival. The room is a unique studio, all wooden (no nails only wooden pegs holding the barnOs towering hemlock beams together) with locally quarried bluestone and the ambiance of a church hall.

This CD captures the Reverend in the relaxed atmosphere of an afternoon workshop at Allegheney University, Pennsalvania, playing his guitar, harmonica and banjo to an enthralled audience. Within days of this concert the Reverend announced to an audience at the University of Indiana.

When Sir Colin Davis was asked to select a composer to write a new work for his 80th birthday he chose James MacMillan, about to celebrate his own 50th birthday. MacMillan had previously considered writing a passion and used the opportunity of the commission to produce a setting based on the Gospel of St John.The result is a highly dramatic passion, fusing MacMillan's own Catholic faith, compositional style and musical influences with the long tradition of settings for the passion of Christ in both the Catholic and Lutheran faiths. In addition to the choir and orchestra, MacMillan uses a small choir of professional singers to provide the narration and a solitary baritone soloist to portray Christus.The work received its première on 27th April 2008 at the Barbican, in London, and follows the LSOLive release of two of James MacMillan's earlier works: The World's Ransoming and The Confession of Isobel Gowdie in January 2008.

Guy Davis has developed into a consummate bluesman. He's listened hard to classic Delta blues and based his style on it, without ever becoming a carbon copy of the greats. Instead they're his jumping-off point into something as individual as "Layla, Layla," where didgeridoo makes an appearance, or the poignant "Joppatowne." Equally adept on guitar, banjo, and harmonica, he's become a force of nature, with the ability to write a song like "I Don't Know" that sounds as if it had come directly from the '30s, alongside covers of Fred McDowell, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sleepy John Estes. The originals and older work mesh perfectly, the sign of a real bluesman. And, of course, he's capable of working the other side of the coin to blues, in gospel, as the closer, "God's Unchanging Hand," clearly shows. This is the tradition reborn and revitalized. Davis' support is wonderfully sympathetic, but he's completely at the center of things, the motivator and mover of this music, and a purveyor of the real blues. His lineage is obvious, and he's the new generation, doing it right and keeping it real.