UnBlues
From ‘Untrue Blues’ to ‘Unchain My Heart’, we have mixed 17 ‘Jazz & Blues‘ tunes around the theme of ‘”Un”words‘. It has John Lee Hooker, Stacey Kent, Lina Nyberg & Esbjörn Svensson, Ana Popovic and many more.
Candi Staton: There are southern soul voices and there are southern soul voices. Raw and ravaged, Candi Staton’s is one of the signature sounds of the genre. It’s a voice with a tear in it, the cry of a woman wounded by life, by men, by woes turned inwards.
Boo Boo Davis : Boo Boo Davis is a survivor and belongs to the last generations of musicians that write and play the blues based on first hand experience of a hard life in the Mississippi Delta. He was born and raised in Drew, Mississippi in the heart of Delta. It was the richest cotton land in the South and the large amounts of field workers attracted the best musicians from the surrounding areas. The entire Delta region was rich with blues, but the town of Drew was a particularly fertile one.
Brownie McGhee i Eulogy : They were my heroes, the crippled Brownie leading the blind Sonny and vice versa. I was, according to Brownie, “the Panama Canal that brought the Atlantic and the Pacific together.” (Sonny had a home with his wife Emma in Hollis, Queens, New York, not far from the ocean.) And as you probably know, Sonny and Brownie were together for 45 years. So you could only imagine why in 1968 they stopped talking to each other but kept working together for another fifteen years. (That’s another story.)
Clarence Gatemouth Brown : Born in Vinton, Louisiana, Brown was raised in Orange, Texas. His professional musical career began in 1945, playing drums in San Antonio, Texas. Tagged with the “Gatemouth” handle by a high school instructor who accused Brown of having a “voice like a gate,” Brown has used it to his advantage throughout his illustrious career. He took note, and his fame took off, during his impromptu fill-in in a 1947 concert by T-Bone Walker in Don Robey’s Bronze Peacock Houston nightclub. When Walker became ill, Brown took up his guitar and played “Gatemouth Boogie,” to the delight of the audience.
Ana Popovic : The back to the roots & blues album ‘Unconditional’ is produced by Ana Popovic and Grammy Award winning John Porter. The record features New Orleans very best musicians like Ana’s slide idol Sonny Landreth and Jon Cleary on B3 and piano. Also harp player Jason Ricci makes a guest appearance.
Champion Jack Dupree @ Cascade Blues : Dupree was a fun-loving man despite the themes of his music and was known to occasionally get up and dance while introducing his numbers. He found success in a multitude of professions throughout his life: musician, boxer, cook and even as a painter towards the end. Champion Jack Dupree was certainly a renaissance man for the ages.
Buddy Moss @ The Blues Trail : At the height of his popularity disaster struck Moss when he was convicted of the murder of his wife and sentenced to a long prison term. Moss consistently protested his innocence but he served six years in prison before a combination of good behaviour and pleas made on his behalf gained his led to his release in 1941.
Roosevelt Sykes @ Wikipedia : In Chicago, Sykes began to display an increasing urbanity in his lyric-writing, using an 8-bar blues pop gospel structure instead of the traditional 12-bar blues. However, despite the growing urbanity of his outlook, he gradually became less competitive in the post-World War II music scene. After his RCA Victor contract expired, he continued to record for smaller labels, such as United, until his opportunities ran out in the mid 1950s
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