Michael Green

Typically, Grant Green's final album as a leader gets a bum rap. While it's true that this isn't one of Green's best records, it's not by any means his worst. The band here is large, and the set concentrates on groove rather than guitar flashiness…

This music, the album EB=MC2 and Chapman and Banai’s concerts together before that can ultimately be traced back to two valleys. One near Hawnby, North Yorkshire, lush green and full of trees, the other, more austere, in northern Galilee. Michael Chapman, paying his way through Art College in the early ’60s worked as a woodsman on the North Yorkshire Mexborough estate in the summer breaks and found inspiration for classics like “In the Valley” and “Among the Trees,” leaning against the trees with his guitar. Slightly later, Ehud Banai spent an extended reflective period in the ’70s, alone near Rosh Pina in Galilee, with his guitar, a ghetto blaster and one cassette. On that inspirational cassette was Michel Chapman’s 1969 Fully Qualified Survivor album. Travel forward over 30 years to 2012, and Ehud, now a successful musician with a string of his own albums, is playing The 12 Bar Club on Denmark Street in London.

There's something fun and catchy about Michael Messer's eclectic album, King Guitar. Although the guitar featured on the cover is a vintage acoustic model, the music runs the gauntlet between down-and-dirty electric blues and quiet Delta slide. In a way, this mixture is sort of like an early Fleetwood Mac, with Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer bringing different blues styles together in one group. Messer, however, accomplishes all of this by himself. His acoustic slide guitar is the epitome of taste on the lovely "Crow Blues" and the happy, upbeat "Steel Guitar Blues".