Girls With Guitars Rock On

The Ruf Records website describes it succinctly: “The name says it all. ‘Girls with Guitars’ - the 2011 Ruf Records Blues Caravan Tour - presents three of the scene's hottest young female guitar slingers on a single stage.” The website further talks about the Blues Caravan series leading successful tours throughout Europe and the US and “This unique triple bill revue has helped introduce bright new stars” citing Ana Popovic and Joanne Shaw Taylor and refers to the new disc and tour as introducing “a trio of dynamic, up-and-coming blues talents: Dani Wilde, Cassie Taylor and Samantha Fish.” I am familiar with Cassie Taylor from her playing bass with her father Otis and Dani has been associated with Candye Kane. I did not know she was from England and unfamiliar with Samantha who is from Kansas City.

For an album spotlighting upcoming blues talents, one might expect some blues but between the opening cover of the Rolling Stones’ Bitch and the Paul Pena penned Steve Miller Band classic, Jet Airliner, the trio contribute ten performances that certainly one can’t complain if one labeled them rock tunes, with different levels of blues tinges. This is not to comment on the quality of the performances, but to observe that the fact some songs are blues-tinged and the performers are influenced by the blues doesn’t mean that recording is a blues album. I do not buy that playing music derivative of blues-rock and blues-influenced blues is extending the blues. It is simply rebadging rock as blues.

Dani Wilde’s Reason to Stay, a solo performance backed by her dobro, is a folk-blues performance and showcases her vocals as much as her dobro. Also outstanding out is Samantha Fish’s shuffle, Wait a Minute, with her best vocal here and strong guitar. But that tune is followed by the pounding rhythms of the trio’s topical Get Back, on which Mike Zito provides a heavy rock guitar solo, Fish’s playing on her own Come On Home has her heartfelt vocal on the wistful lyric of turning blue with a melody that has a Dylan-esque feel and nice guitar. Fish plays some nice atmospheric slide guitar behind Cassie Taylor’s aching vocal on Leaving Chicago, but the folk-blues edges of the song contrast with the heavy rock guitar of Fish on Taylor’s Move On.

I would say that Move On, along with Get Back, are the tracks with the least appeal to me, as I did enjoy the music on this although I would not rate it highly as a blues recording. All three are quite talented both vocally and instrumentally (I am more partial to Taylor and Wilde as vocalists, but that is a matter of subjective taste) and this is a very enjoyable collection of blues-influenced rock.

I received this from a publicist.

Otis Taylor's Gripping Clovis People

A new recording by Otis Taylor has become an event. He has produced some of the most original and intriguing of new artists associated with the blues with unusual musical settings and deep lyrical themes. He is one of the few blues artists to have DownBeat award 5 stars this century, and other publications have similarly given his music great acclaim. His music has been labelled trance blues, but it has precedent in the similar blues of John Lee Hooker (thinking about his slow dirges from early in his career as well as the swirling similar style of Robert Pete Williams. There are other examples in modern jazz as well as contemporary composed music (think of Steven Reich) that makes use of repetition musical elements and a droning sound.

Taylor’s most recent release is “Clovis People Vol. 3” (Telarc) and continues in the genre-busting vein of his earlier recordings. The title of the disc refers to the civilization known as the Clovis people, who walked the earth briefly about 13,000 years ago and then mysteriously disappeared. There have been only four or five sites of them found by anthropologists and one was recently located a 100 yards or so from Taylor’s home. "That's amazing to me," says Taylor. "There have only been four or five sites like this found all over the country. That means these people probably walked on my property. I went back to my musical past with these songs. That’s why I called it Volume 3. There really is no Volume 1 or 2. My music only goes back about ten years, but there's something about reaching back to an earlier time and revisiting the stories of the past from a new perspective that I find compelling."

For this volume he is joined by guitarist Gary Moore, who has been on previous recordings, pedal steel guitarist of the Campbell Brothers, cornetist Ron Miles and Taylor’s daughter, Cassie Taylor while he himself employs a variety of instruments and textures. The musicians are like paints, embellishing on the underlying groove with a burst of electric guitar or smear from a cornet enhancing the mood. Taylor’s vocals carry the same emotional weight as a field holler, as on the opening “Rain So Hard,” as he she describes his woman walking out after discovering his lies as it rained and snowed so hard while it sounds like a sitar being plucked as Miles adds a repeated trumpet riff to add to his repeated single note picking. “Little Willie,” opens with keen crying pedal steel as Taylor relates the story of Little Willie going to school and the “bad boys came and took his life away” leaving his mother to cry with the simple, emphatic accompaniment to Taylor’s haunting vocals . In contrast “Lee and Arnaz,” has a bit of a folk feel with the accompaniment (fiddle contrasting with Moore’s electric guitar commentary), with a message that there is no color there is no difference. The remaining of the album illustrates these same qualities. The music is mesmerizing, the songs powerful and the vocals by Taylor intimate, yet haunting. The result is another collection of thoroughly original and compelling performances from Otis Taylor.

For FTC purposes, I received my review copy from the publicist for the recording company.