Omar Beltrab

“Omar Rodríguez-López Group is a long term friend of our studio. Our series "…Live at Clouds Hill" started in 2011 with an improvised “Krautrock” performance of extraordinaire: Faust & Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. Jean-Hervé Perón fell backwards with a running chainsaw and slit Rodriguez-Lopez' jeans and only with luck not his leg open.”

Mississippi-born but Texas-based Omar Kent Dykes understands a fundamental fact about modern electric blues. He knows there are only a handful of rhythms and themes in the blues grab bag, and he uses them all over and over again in slightly different guises. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The blues has lasted this long because it's supposed to sound like the blues, and if you stretch it too far you end up with something like prog rock. It is this fundamental conservatism of the blues and its limited palette that has kept the form alive long after its colorful offspring (R&B, soul, rock & roll etc.) have flown the roost, taking a large part of the audience with them. But Omar understands all this. He has had a 30-year career playing these rhythms, and he knows how to keep it all simple, direct, and powerful, and how to build new songs out of the fabric of the old songs without destroying their familiarity. Bamboozled, a live set recorded at the Musa in Gottingen, Germany on October 20, 2005, finds Omar & the Howlers looking back over that 30 years of bars, sheds, and studios and hitting some of the high points…….