Milton Benett

He may not be a household name, but die-hard blues fans know Little Milton as a superb all-around electric bluesman – a soulful singer, an evocative guitarist, an accomplished songwriter, and a skillful bandleader. He's often compared to the legendary B.B. King – as well as Bobby "Blue" Bland – for the way his signature style combines soul, blues, and R&B, a mixture that helped make him one of the biggest-selling bluesmen of the '60s (even if he's not as well-remembered as King). As time progressed, his music grew more and more orchestrated, with strings and horns galore. He maintained a steadily active recording career all the way from his 1953 debut on Sam Phillips' legendary Sun label, with his stunning longevity including notable stints at Chess (where he found his greatest commercial success), Stax, and Malaco.

Milton + esperanza – a new album by Brazilian legend Milton Nascimento and decorated musician/composer esperanza spalding – will be released August 9 on Concord Records. Recorded in Brazil over the course of 2023, Milton + esperanza is a dream-come-true collaboration and musical representation of a friendship that was first kindled nearly 15 years ago. The album features 16 tracks that celebrate and reimagine five of Nascimento’s beloved classics, newly written originals by spalding, and fascinating interpretations of The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life” and Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” among other works that lovingly explore the music of Brazil and far beyond. Special guest appearances include Paul Simon, Dianne Reeves, Lianne La Havas, Maria Gadú, Tim Bernardes, Carolina Shorter, Shabaka Hutchings and more. Milton + esperanza sparkles with duets between these two iconic voices, exquisite musicianship and what spalding identifies as a central theme of the album: the importance of younger generations creating with, learning from, and building new worlds with elders.

An elaborately produced piece of vinyl, Journey to Dawn was, alas, the result of yet another campaign to prematurely place Nascimento into the U.S. market in a big way. The cosmopolitan tropicalismo movement continued to leave its mark on Nascimento, placing the bossa nova on the back burner and replacing it with an urgency often generated by four-square rock rhythms and electric guitars, percussive sounds from the Brazilian jungle, and some orchestrations from California.

Friend Of Mine (1976). Recorded in the wake of the collapse of Stax Records in 1976, Friend of Mine brushed up against a long fallow period in Little Milton's recorded output, and was also unavailable for many years, thus making it one of his least-known albums. Produced by Milton for Henry Stone's TK Records and issued on the Glades Records imprint, this is a soulful blues workout drenched in sweaty vocals and long, sustained performances, of which perhaps the best is the five-and-a-half-minute "You're Gonna Make Me Cry," which also includes some impressive guitar. The record's strongest body of songs are the smooth soul ballads such as "Baby It Ain't No Way," the rousing "Don't Turn Away" (a song that one wishes Elvis Presley could have discovered and considered covering)…

The Bobbin Blues Masters Part 1 (1994). Reissuing the Bobbin recordings of Little Milton and Clayton Love on the same compilation makes sense, although the two men sounded enough alike during the 1950s that some might find it hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. Both men were born in Mississippi; Milton Campbell was co-founder and A&R director of the Bobbin record label in East St. Louis, and Clayton Love rose to prominence as Ike Turner's pianist. Compiled and released by the budget Collectables label in 1994, this first volume of Bobbin Blues Masters consists of eight titles by Little Milton (including his first major hit "I'm a Lonely Man," 1958) and three by Clayton Love, whose "Limited Love" (also a hit single in 1958) had instrumental support from a group led by bassist Roosevelt Marks…