Page 52 - BiTS_09_SEPTEMBER_2022

1. Black Horse Blues (Blind Lemon Jefferson)

2. Betcha I Getcha (Bix Beiderbecke & Joe Venuti)

3. Michigan Water Blues (Jelly Roll Morton)

4. Lady Of The Lavender Mist (Duke Ellington)
5. The Whale Has Swallowed Me (J. B. Lenoir)

6. Boll Weevil Holler (Vera Hall)
7. The Jitterbug Waltz (Thomas “Fats” Waller)

8. Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good To You? (Don Redman & Andy Razaf)
9. Gold Tooth Blues (Tennessee Williams & Geoff Muldaur)

10. Prairie Lullaby (Billy Hill)

11. Mistreated Mama (Billy Smythe, Ben Brown, Syl Yunker)

12. Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies (Traditional Appalachian Ballad)

13. The Frog (Geoff Muldaur)

14. My Little One (Tennessee Williams & Geoff Muldaur)

15. Heavenly Grass (Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles, Geoff Muldaur)

16. Octet In Three Movements: Overture – His Last Letter – Homage (Geoff Muldaur)

The true beauty of this music is firstly the deep respect that Muldaur gives to the originals and
to the sources of the melodies and secondly the sometimes profoundly elegant arrangements
Geoff and his colleagues surround them with. The music is assisted here by some of Holland's

finest musicians (hence the Amsterdam Project), including his producer, Gert-Jan Blom, and
several members of Blom's wonderful Beau Hunks ensemble. Informed by jazz and by
Muldaur’s love of Schubert and Beethoven (don’t let the big names put you off) the
arrangements are both clever and sensitive and very, very apposite.

My favourite is, without doubt, ‘Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies’, an Appalachian ‘love’
song, I learned more than sixty years ago, from Ms Shirley Collins.

‘The Frog’ is a delightful soundscape that must be heard, while Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘Michigan
Water Blues’ reminds me — as it always does these days— of the havoc brought about by the
(ongoing) mismanagement of water in Flint, Michigan which, sad to say, tastes no longer, ‘like
cherry wine’.

The final track is a twenty-minute tribute by Geoff to his great-grandfather who served as a
lieutenant commander in the US Navy and was killed in 1870 when his ship, the U.S.S. Oneida,
was accidentally rammed and sank in Yokohama harbour. It was inspired by the recent
discovery of a letter that had been written and mailed to Geoff's great-grandmother just before
the ship left port in Japan—his last letter.
Ian K McKenzie