Pat Brown

Sadly, we lost Kim Simmonds just this past December, but he lives on thanks to Quarto Valley Records who has released Blues All Around, his final album with his legendary blues rock band, Savoy Brown. The new album from one of the longest running blues rock bands in existence follows Savoy Brown’s critically acclaimed 2022 album, Ain’t Done Yet. Shortly after the new album was completed, Savoy Brown founder, guitarist/ singer/songwriter Kim Simmonds lost his hard-fought battle with cancer on December 13th, just a week after turning 75. While recuperating from his initial cancer treatments, Simmonds had begun work on the new album that was to become Blues All Around.

A radical departure from the type of slick pop/rock she'd been embracing on albums like Tropico and Wide Awake in Dreamland, True Love found Pat Benatar embracing blues and early pre-rock R&B. Opting for less production and a much rawer approach, an inspired Benatar ditches the synthesizers and keyboards and sounds like she's leading a bar band in a Chicago dive. From Albert King's "I Get Evil" to B.B. King's "Payin' the Cost to Be the Boss" to Charles Brown's "Please Come Home for Christmas," the results aren't breathtaking, but are generally honest and soulful. Quite clearly, this was an album Benatar was eager to make.

Although early in the year Martino had fiddled around with many styles, and that nothing truly relevant come out of those experiments, he eventually found a path that suited him fine late that summer of 1976;Fusion was hardly a novelty but all over the world many were the enthusiastic musicians and audiences passionately driven by the possibilities it opened up and by how an excellent mirror for outstanding playing, a renewal of songwriting instincts and rules and chops display it was; this latter issue led to many abuses and unashamed revelations of mere self-indulgent overplaying but the exceptions that justified its existence were enough to keep the genre alive; this album is one of those.
Our shy Italo-American enlisted the help of a trio of Funk oriented and astoundingly reliable in spite of their youth Afro-Americans (Delmar Brown keyboards, Mark Leonard electric bass and Kenwood Dennard drums and percussion)…

For this intriguing club date, guitarist Pat Martino (who by the early 1970s had his own distinctive sound) really stretches out on two of his originals (including "Special Door," which clocks in at 17:43) and the pop song "Sunny." With keyboardist Ron Thomas, electric bassist Tyrone Brown and drummer Sherman Ferguson offering alert and forceful support, Martino performs music that falls between advanced hard bop, fusion and the avant-garde without really fitting into any of the genres.

2017 release from the veteran blues outfit. Blues is not for the faint-hearted. Since the genre first drew breath, it's greatest practitioners have embraced the darkness, spinning tales of hardship and death, hellhounds and devilry. If the sleeve of Witchy Feelin' suggests that Kim Simmonds, too, has a tendency towards the macabre, then Savoy Brown's iconic leader is happy to confirm it. "Blues has always dealt with themes of the Devil, witchcraft and so forth, and I've always written along those lines. At least three of the songs on Witchy Feelin' have that hoodoo vibe…" Witchy Feelin' proves the Devil still has all the best tunes.