Page 47 - BiTS_05_MAY_2023

Dean Zucchero—Electric Church for the Spiritually
Misguided—Pugnacious ASIN ‏: ‎B0BVT1MWTH

Dean Zucchero is a bass player/producer who is originally from
New York but after a lengthy spell in Europe he relocated back
to the States but to New Orleans. This album features Dean and
his band playing with nine guest vocalists and we also get two
instrumentals. Johnny Rawls kicks us off with ‘Big Boss Boy’ a
funky soul blaster with riffing brass, and ‘Craft Beer’ has Jonathon
‘Boogie’ Long extolling the joys of drinking stout rather than craft
ale (!) and ‘Last Minute Packer’ is a blues featuring the excellent
Ghalia Volt and her slide guitar, plus fiddle! ‘Empty Postbox’ has
Bruce "Sunpie" Barnes on vocals and harmonica and ‘La Belle Poursuite’ is the first of the
instrumentals featuring John Fohl (guitar) and Joe Krown (keyboards).

There is more funk on ‘Fascist Love’ with Leslie Smith and Pap Mali and then Jason Ricci pops
up on harmonica for the other instrumental the short and sweet ‘DBA’. We finish with two
tracks from NOLA residents Johnny Sansone who sings and plays harp on ‘Mortal Man’ and we
close with the jaunty ‘American Dream’ with Jeremy Joyce on vocals. This is an album of great
variety courtesy of the different front men/women and Dean and the band back them up well
to produce an album of quite commercial blues-based songs.

Graham Harrison

Eric Bibb—Ridin’—Repute Records ASIN : B0BVJ9TGGJ

I’m always excited about the prospect of a new Eric Bibb album
- not just because of his wonderful voice and excellent guitar
playing but his recent albums have featured new songs in the
blues tradition that comment on both the history and the current
conditions for black people both in the States and the world at
large. We begin here with ‘Family’ a song that has the message
that we are all family and the title track is about ridin’ the
freedom train – both are band songs with Eric out front. ‘Blues
Funky Like That’ is a great driving trance blues with Eric, Taj
Mahal and Jontavious Willis, while ‘The Ballad of John Howard
Griffin’ is a story of a white man who in 1959 changed his skin colour and posed as a black man
and experienced first-hand brutal discrimination. ‘Tulsa Town’ is the story of a racial massacre
where 300 black people were killed in ‘Black Wall Street’ in 1921.

‘Call Me by My Name’ is another call for racial equality with Eric sharing the vocals with Harrison
Kennedy and ‘Free’ is a beautiful ballad with Habib Koite adding an exotic edge with his Malian
vocals and guitar playing. Russell Malone also adds delicious guitar on ‘Hold the Line’ and
French Saharan blues guitarist Amar Sundy also brings an exotic touch to ‘I Got My Own’.
However, it’s not all new songs here, Eric also breathes new life into the old folk chestnut ‘500
Miles’ which features banjo and fiddle and ‘Sinner Man’ is another old folk song recorded live
with Eric’s ‘string band’ at the Wheatland Festival. Most of the songs here are in the band format
with multiple musicians providing the backing and backing vocals, including multi-
instrumentalist Glen Scott, Ola Gustafsson, Esbjon Hazelious, Stafan Astner, Tommy Simms, Dirk
Powell, Cedric Watson, Steve Jordan etc. etc.

Although there are some great songs and performances here and Eric’s singing and guitar
playing are as fine as always, I’m afraid that I didn’t find this quite as good as his previous