Sidewalk Saints

Ben Bowen King

Talking Taco Records TT1530

www.talkingtaco.com

Lots of talent here. Lots of talent going to waste. Samey as hell. Flirts with a really interesting acoustic slide guitar version of "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" for 46 minutes.

Essentials

Ellis Paul

Rounder Records PHILO11671-1250-2

www.rounder.com

Ellis Paul is one of the best lyricists and composers in modern, acoustic pop. Still by and large regional (Boston-centric) in stature, he deserves all the attention the music world can send his way, so this two-CD collection, like anything else his label/management/friends network can generate for him, is a great thing. If you already know this raspy, sensitive, sorta-cross between Paul Simon and Robbie Robertson, you'll be happy to know he's got more material out. If the name is new to you, please do yourself and your listening friends a favor and get familiar with him soonest.

This double release, comprised mainly of material from previous records, is a great intro for EP newcomers. For those who already know Ellis Paul, it is a reminder that all of his recordings are marvelous; an extended-length, "greatest hits" collection of his work can be any combination that fills two CDs. His work is majestic, sweet, subtly intricate and introspective. One cannot overpraise him.

Unconditional

Eric Bruton

Pelican Records PR030045

http://pelican.capefearnet.net/Catalogue.html

I wonder if these guys know how important they are to us. True, earthy, roots folk music has to be here with us, no matter what touches our favorite, surface nerves and aesthetics. This is what taught us to hum. This is what we walk and work to. This is the first song you ever wrote and I ever wrote, and we've all written songs at one time, whether we knew or even recognized the act at the time. Let's try an analogy -- Hey, all you New Yorkers gnoshing on miniature beefshroom kabobs at that post-cubist art gallery opening, spare a thought and lift your plastic stemware once to the cattleman in Kansas and the butcher in Chicago, will you? They're there. They're part of your event. It couldn't happen and you couldn't be there without them having rolled up their sleeves and done what they do. Not to criticize or judge your fruits, but the best, healing contact with the real world you live in requires that you deal with the roots instead of the fruits once in awhile. This artist, on this as on past releases and in frequent Eastern North Carolina performance, is the roots.

The titles give a good feel for the release: "Unconditional," "Fernandina Nights," "Precious Rose," "Winter Magnolias," "Love Like This," "Hasbeen Romance," "Love Again With You," "For the Smiles," "All Over Again," "So Long Blues," Wilmington to Fort Worth," "Anniversary Song," "Siren's Song" and "Don't Turn Away." They sound, from title to fade, like they began with a stubby pencil on the first available scrap of paper, which is how a natural poet, existing in the real world, has to do it. The inspiration comes before the gathering of songwriting tools.

This is healing music. Eric Bruton heals. He does so through the magic of accessibility. What he heals is the listener's perspective. Blue becomes blue again; the fruits connect again to the roots, and the nourishment comes from the ground and makes everything sweeter.

It is humbling to attempt to describe something so direct and simple, for the reviewer's tools are nowhere near as good as Mr. Bruton's.

He's easy to find online. Have a look and a listen. It'll do you a real world of good.

Instrumentals 1967 - 1996

Canned Heat

RUF Records RUF1119

www.rufrecords.de

Q: What did the DeadHead say when he ran out of pot?

A: Wow, this band sucks.

You know that old joke. Whether you believe the principle it expresses fits the Grateful Dead or not is immaterial here. It expresses this reviewer's impression of this collection of Canned Heat instrumentals.

Yours Truly

Natalie MacMaster

Rounder Records ROUNDER11661-7065-2

www.rounderrecords.com

[from her online bio]She has shared the stage with Santana, The Chieftains, Paul Simon, Pavarotti, Faith Hill, Don Henley, Michael McDonald and dozens of distinguished symphony orchestras, and has appeared on national television programs such as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, ABC’s New Year’s Eve special “ABC 2002” and Good Morning America.

There are reasons why she's appeared in such varied and renowned company. As an individual artist, she can keep up with them and excite them. As a Celtic music purist, she knows that there's one story in all the cultural history of humankind, and that each good tune is a chapter in that story, and other real artists hunger, as she does, to be part of the telling of that story.

Yours Truly is poignant and playful, dramatic and deep, free and focused, as needed and when appropriate. It's blue-eyed soul. It's what you'll want to listen to when you don't know what to listen to.

Eight Days Down

Jen Elliott & BluesTruck

City Canyon Records JEED-009

www.citycanyons.com

Originally, I thought she should offer workshops on womanhood, but realized she’d confuse the people most likely to attend such events. She wouldn’t give the over-sensitive, effeminate man in the dusty, back corner of that community college classroom any reason to cry. She wouldn’t help recruit for the budding, local Wiccan chapter, or for Mothers Against Republicans. She wouldn’t raise awareness of the feminine aspects of the Godhead.

Those workshops always begin with goddesses, then move on to Mother Earth, then to maternity as magic before they get into the realm of real, live women and what’s best, strong and radiant about them. Again, she wouldn’t raise awareness of the feminine aspects of the Godhead. To the contrary, she would raise awareness of the deific aspects of the feminine sex. Jen Elliott is in the realm of real, live women the whole time, and that’s a great thing.

The blues/rock/pop fusion thing, in her hands, is a very interesting and gratifying thing. Whereas it is a well-known truism that, in nature, most hybrids are sterile, her hybrid style is blatantly carnal. The band churns, grinds and rocks like the “Some Girls” era Rolling Stones, and that’s a pretty good way to do it. Ms. Elliott delivers the songs so consistently and convincingly that one is shocked to learn that these 11 pennings stem from various collaborations, some of which do not even include her. Good, modern, sexy, fresh and in all ways gratifying.

Legends of American Music - The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong

Time Life Records B000IHYVU0

www.timelife.com

It's already been said, and by people whose opinions matter exponentially more than that of a smalltime critic. Any decent Louis Armstrong anthology gives proof to the praises that follow, and this is a far better than decent anthology. It is a judiciously chosen and clearly re-mastered audio monument to a colossus.

• "What he does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul." - Leonard Bernstein on Louis Armstrong

• "Louis Armstrong is the master of the jazz solo. He became the beacon, the light in the tower, that helped the rest of us navigate the tricky waters of jazz improvisation." -- Ellis Marsalis

• "Armstrong is to music what Einstein is to physics and the Wright Brothers are to travel." -- "Jazz" documentary producer Ken Burns

• "(Armstrong was) the key creator of the mature working language of jazz. Three decades after his death and more than three-quarters of a century since his influence first began to spread, not a single musician who has mastered that language fails to make daily use, knowingly or unknowingly, of something that was invented by Louis Armstrong."-- Dan Morgenstern - Oxford Companion to Jazz

• "It's America's classical music ... this becomes our tradition ... the bottom line of any country in the world is what did we contribute to the world? ... we contributed Louis Armstrong"-- Tony Bennett

• "If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original." -- Duke Ellington

• "In my opinion, Louis Armstrong is the greatest trumpet stylist of all time and has influenced every trumpet player of his time and long after" -- Al Hirt

• "He left an undying testimony to the human condition in the America of his time" -- Wynton Marsalis

• "You can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played" -- Miles Davis

• "Americans, unknowingly, live part of every day in the house that Satch built"-- noted critic Leonard Feather

• "If you don't like Louis Armstrong, you don't know how to love"-- Mahalia Jackson

• ".. Armstrong's improvisational verve and technical virtuosity defined jazz ... and his engaging personality and ever-present grin made him a natural as the international ambassador of jazz, America's greatest gift to the world"-- Life Magazine ~ The 100 People Who Made The Millenium

  [On The Passing Of Louis Armstrong]

• --"Mrs. Nixon and I share the sorrow of millions of Americans at the death of Louis Armstrong. One of the architects of an American art form, a free and individual spirit, and an artist of worldwide fame, his great talents and magnificent spirit added richness and pleasure to all our lives."-- President Richard Nixon

• "Louis is not dead, for his music is and will remain in the hearts and minds of countless millions of the world's peoples, and in the playing of hundreds of thousands of musicians who have come under his influence."-- Dizzy Gillespie; July 17, 1971

• "His memory will be enshrined in the archives of effective international communications. The Department of State, for which he traveled on tours to almost every corner of the globe, mourns the passing of this great American."-- U.S. State Department

The Butterfield/Bloomfield Concert

The Ford Blues Band

Blue Rock'it Records BRCD141

www.bluerockit.com

It may be tacky or arrogant to second guess disciples who've gone to all the trouble of learning their masters' songs and invested everything that goes into a record into paying them tribute and praising them in their own songs. It may be. Go ahead, then, cuss this reviewer, but I could swear blues harmonica was a major part of the front line in Paul Butterfield's band, and its near-absence from this release is disappointing. "Where," readers might ask, "are the Fords going to find a harpman like Paul Butterfield?" That's a good question, but they didn't hesitate to let another guitarist try to fill Bloomfield's shoes.

It's a very good record, and it earns high marks for The Ford Blues Band, but a record of the same length and quality focusing on them instead of on Butterfield and Bloomfield would hit a more realistic target closer to the center. In all probability, the less one knows about The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the better this record sounds. I look forward to The Ford Blues Band's next release.

The Dance Goes On

Volker Strifler Band

Blue Rock'it Records BRCD142

www.bluerockit.com

I'd pay an $8.00 cover to see them, and I wouldn't boo them if they opened for the Stones live or backed Carey Bell on record. They like the blues, and they've studied it, and they can play it, and they're trying to do something different, and they sure would have been lucky if they'd been born 20 years earlier, when there was less competition. There's nothing wrong with them at all, quite the contrary, but what was really, really good 20 years ago is today, with a bigger blues scene, merely a "good+." I'm happy they're experimenting with Chicago standards like "Evil" and "Spoonful" and recycling them as acoustic-based slide pieces, but what's your next trick? I'm glad they can cut heads with the Allman Brothers shtick, but I've got three local radio stations playing "Eat a Peach" cuts. It's a lot easier to be a great blues band than to be an exciting, novel one these days.

Hey, they're better than any band in my region, and I wish I could laud them more highly, but the competition all over the blues recording world is mighty stiff.

Half the Perfect World

Madeleine Peyroux

Rounder Records ROUNDER11661-3252-2

www.rounder.com

Quiet, insightful versions of good songs. Not quite lounge, not quite pop, not quite jazz, the record interprets from Ms. Peyroux's perspective, and that's a very good thing. Assuming your circle of friends is over 40 ad lucid, it would be hard to find anyone who wouldn't like this CD. A dozen songs, several recognizable from original or hit versions by artists ranging from Tom Waits to Glen Campbell.

A treasure. That's all there is to it. A treasure.

Everything I Need

Aynsley Lister

RUF Records RUF1059

www.rufrecords.de

He's the light at the beginning of the tunnel. The tunnel of despair, marked by flickering lights of humor, hope, virtuosity and short-term escape is a big part of the trip one takes on the Midnight Special, the Hellbound Train, the Mystery Train, down where the Southern crosses the Dog ... the train of the blues. At the other end of the tunnel, well, that's where the sun is going to shine on my back door someday. In the meantime, I'll get solace from the humor, hope, virtuosity and short-term escape that exquisite players, singers and band leaders like Aynsley Lister provide.

This is one of the best electric blues releases to cross this critic's desktop in the last year. What else can I say?

Thundering Silence

Oxymora

Falling Mountain Records FM-1048

www.falingmountain.com

Small combo world music, rooted in neo-Celtic, with Iberian undertones and a striving for classical resonance in production. That's a good thing. What one hears here is a group of brilliant players matching and lifting one another. It takes the listener to new heights and refreshes general appreciation for music and musicianship.

Interestingly, most of the material here was originally recorded in '82, before "world music" entered our vocabularies and accessible record bins. This is part of what created and defined the genre. Therapeutic and tranquil.

Tribal Beatz

UMOYA

ARC Music EUCD2038

www.arcmusic.co.uk

African percussion-led pop. Hmmm. There might be inspiration here for some mainstream drummers. Maybe. It actually sounds very sanitized and stripped of native character for an ARC release. It has dynamics, but these people are not griots. They're not carrying on any tradition except the music industry's tradition of making a buck. Sorry.

On the other hand, ARC is a wonderful label, a banner-bearer for real world music, especially that of Africa, and they've probably taken a beating on a lot of their best releases, which are too specialized to appeal to mass audiences. Maybe something like this, something that can get some college and alternative airplay, will sell well enough to finance some more of the label's best stuff. Maybe it retains just enough roots flavor to make those who hear it a little more receptive to the aesthetic gifts ARC has given us in plenty over the years.

One hopes.