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American
Beauty
Todd
Mack
Yonder
The Big Blue Holler (Off the Beat-N-Track)
This 10-track Americana romp plays like a woozy set in an
Appalachian roadhouse in which miraculous things happen somewhere
between the seventh and eighth longneck. Beautifully recorded
at Mack’s Off The Beat-N-Track studio in Western Massachusetts,
the disc has a casual and organic nature that is belied by
the fact that more than 25 different musicians pitch in on
the tunes. You got yer pedal steel, yer Hammond organ, yer
banjo, yer fiddle, yer pennywhistle. . . . The rollicking
“Five Nights Drunk” features a full-throttle Dixieland band
breakdown, like an itinerant horn section happened to wander
across the stage and agree to play for drinks for a couple
of minutes. “Devil Outta Me” is a Muscle Shoals-style funk
workout that sounds like a lost Booker T hit, filtered through
the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Mack is no stranger to any of this, having put in his time
touring and recording with Atlanta’s the Griswolds through
much of the ’90s before settling down in the Berkshires as
a studio owner and, more recently, acclaimed children’s book
author. His voice bears a passing resemblence to Jerry Garcia’s,
a voice that sounds high, lonesome, and irrepressably optimistic
at once. Mack shares guitar duties with Berkshire guitar aces
Bobby Sweet, Steve Ide and Tor Krautter.
The disc closes with the utterly moving “Beautiful Angel,”
a song-poem about his old friend and former bandmate Daniel
Pearl, the journalist brutally murdered by his Pakistani kidnappers
in 2002, which features loops of Pearl playing the fiddle.
—Paul
Rapp
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| The
Captain, well served: Fast ’n’ Bulbous’ Pork Chop Blue
Around the Rind. |
Fast
’n’ Bulbous
Pork
Chop Blue Around the Rind (Cuneiform)
Just
as they always do, the times have changed. More than 25 years
ago, I was playing in a band whose sole purpose initially
was to cover songs by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.
One of Boston’s then-hip clubs presented us, but when we wanted
to return after our successful debut we were informed that
they didn’t book cover bands. (We subsequently went on to
become an original band, but that’s another story I’ll save
to bore grandchildren with, holding forth from a front-porch
rocking chair.)
The
Magic Band re-formed a couple years ago, presenting mesmerizing
and exact versions of Beefheart tunes (they were, after all,
the ones to work out and perform the intricate geometry the
first time around). Fast ‘n’ Bulbous are led by saxophonist
Philip Johnston, and they do the only reasonable thing left
to do: They treat the music as compositions, open to new and
fresh arrangements. With a four-horn lineup, the interplay
is between the pair of reeds, the pair of brass, guitarist
Gary Lucas (who played in the latter Magic Band incarnation,
as well as the re-formed unit), and a rhythm section. Songs
like “Abba Zabba,” “When It Blows It Stacks” and “Tropical
Hot Dog Night” move the guitar lines to the horns, leaving
it all strikingly familiar, while also revealing subtle powers
in the simple melodies. Elsewhere, “Dali’s Car” takes on an
air of shiny but fractured modernism, while “Kandy Korn” sounds
like a New Orleans parade making a side trip into a funhouse.
—David
Greenberger
John
Hammond
In
Your Arms Again (Back Porch)
For more than four decades, John Hammond Jr. has been among
the best white country blues interpreters. Now the 62-year-old
guitarist and harmonica player is back with a new release,
In Your Arms Again, proving the son of the legendary
Columbia Records talent scout John Hammond Sr. still has his
funky touch.
Recording in the ambience of a deconsecrated church in Salinas,
Kansas, Hammond is joined by Stephen Hodges on drums and percussion
and Marty Ballou on basses for a dozen songs by Howlin’ Wolf,
Willie Dixon, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Bob
Dylan, Bukka White, Percy Mayfield, and, for the second consecutive
disc, himself. Hammond is a superb guitar player who can fingerpick
complex parts on the acoustic, play slide well, and handle
the electric when it suits the song. Vocally, he tries to
sound black when singing blues. This is high-risk behavior
for the Caucasian larynx—it’s easy to sound strained without
the requisite control—but he makes it work.
Hammond’s masterful chops and gritty feel jump your bones
right from the first track, “Jitterbug Swing,” a pulsing Delta-style
slide-guitar showpiece. In a nod to the late Ray Charles,
he does justice to a pair of the Genius’s numbers, “I Got
a Woman” and “Fool for You,” with impassioned singing. For
Howlin’ Wolf’s “I’m Leavin’ You,” “My Baby’s Gone” and “Evil,”
Hammond changes to a postwar Chicago sound, switching
to electric guitar played in a 1950s style reminiscent of
Hubert Sumlin or Jimmy Rodgers. His two originals, the title
track “In Your Arms Again” and “Come to Find Out,” are both
acoustic fingerstyle outings may not break new ground but
nonetheless hold their own with the rest of the selections.
In the last cut, Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,”
Hammond’s voice soars sans his typical black affect, leaving
it to his steel-bodied slide guitar to provide a cool blue
shading.
In
Your Arms Again shows that John Hammond still has something
to say, and that it’s still worth hearing.
—Glenn
Weiser
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