A while back, somebody, maybe SPR mentioned that they were interested in the Blues, but didn't want me to send them a long list... I started to put together a list of what I like, but didn't get it finished and with my daughter's wedding just two weeks away, life has been extremely busy...

Since the Progressive Rock Thread seems to be working, I thought I would start a Blues Thread as well. I'm just going to post 15 of the contemporary blues CD's that I dig and add on later...

BTW, I'm not going to post about some obvious choices like SRV, BB King, Clapton, Johnny Lee Hooker, Albert King, Albert Collins, Bonnie Raitt, Luther Allison or Buddy Guy in the initial post. They are all well known as are some of the ones I mention below, but you may not be aware of them...

Also, you need to know that I dig slow blues, blues ballads and acoustic blues. I'm not particularly fond of shredders in the blues, i.e. Eric Johnson, etc...



Tab Benoit - Nice & Warm (1992)

Tab is my favorite Blues artist. His first four or five albums are all keepers. I've seen him play several times in small venues. The only thing negative I will say about Tab is that lately he's been on a Cajun Country bent. I prefer his straight blues albums. Also, he did a collaboration with Jimmy Thackery called Whisky Store that is excellent. Thackery deserves his own post.



Gary Moore - Ballads & Blues, 1982-1994 (1995)

Normally, I would never suggest a greatest hits type album except that this one would serve as an excellent introduction to Gary Moore the Blues player. Yeah, we all love Gary from his days with Thin Lizzy, BBM and Skid Row, but the thing I dig about Gary is the fantastic blues ballads.



Walter Trout - Go The Distance (2001)

One of the strongest Blues CD's in the past 10 years. Trout used to be considered one of the top 10 guitar players in the world. I have to be honest though, I haven't enjoyed his last few efforts. They just seemed to be lack luster compared with Go the Distance.




Susan Tedeschi - Just Won't Burn (1998)

I wanted to post both of Susan's first two CD's, but then I'd have to post all the discs I like by the other artists. Susan's first two CD's are better that Grace Potter's first two CD's. Does that paint a clear enough picture for you? Oh, and I should mention that back then, Sean Costello who's out on his own now was playing for Susan back then...



Joe Bonamassa - Sloe Gin - (2007)

Joe is the future of the Blues. His debut is excellent as well. This one is full of acoustic remakes and quite simply put, it rocks!



Indigenous - Things We Do (1998)

Think Big Head Todd & the Monsters -Funk +Blues. If you can find the original release with the bonus CD, there's a song on the bonus disc that is one of Mato Nanji's best songs. Mato has already received major accolades for his playing including Carlos Santana asking him to do some live shows with him. Wouldn't that be cool if you were a young guitarist! The only knock I have against Indigenous is that their shows are always short????



Chris Duarte - Tailspin Headwhack (1997)

Think SRV and you've got this guy pegged. I've seen him play a couple times and he is impressive.



Anthony Gomes - Unity (2002)

I've seen Anthony several times including opening for BB King. Anthony blends his R&B roots into his Blues for some rockin' dancy blues. Also does some very nice ballads.



Corey Stevens - Blue Drops of Rain (1995)

Another SRV copy cat, but the dude is good. He's also got a country thing blended into his music.



Rod Piazza & the Mighty Flyers - Alphabet Blues (1992)

Probably the best Blues harpest going today (sorry Harper...) Rod is a great show man. He used to play in this little bar in our down town area and would inevitable leave the stage and end up on top of the bar which was probably about 50 feet long. Honey, Piazza's piano player is one of the best blues pianist of all time!



Gov't Mule - Gov't Mule (1995)

Okay, for you guys that want your faces rocked off, Gov't Mule is your cup of tea. Warren Haynes is a guitar players' player and plays the heaviest blues since the 70's.



Jonny Lang - Lie To Me (1997)

Guitar phenom at 17. Jonny plays well and has enough sense to gather other good players around him.



Kelly Joe Phelps - Roll Away The Stone (1997)

It may sound like an oxymoron, but Kelly Joe produces excellent Christian Blues.



Keb' Mo' (1994)

Okay, okay, Kevin Moore probably should be listed at the top of the page and instead I should have posted about Melvin Taylor or Tommy Castro, but it's my thread and I can give kudos to whomever I feel like giving kudos too... Keb's more a singer songwriter than a blues man, but I dig his stuff.



Coco Montoya - Suspicion (2000)

Coco started in the biz as a drummer for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and learned to play the guitar while touring. After all, he had some of the best teachers this genre can ever boast about. The interesting thing is Coco is left handed and plays a right handed guitar upside down or something like that... This dude's ballads rival Gary Moore's!

Honorable Mention

Cate Brothers - Radioland

All I have to say is check out the song "Am I Losing You". This one song defines what I like about the blues and Coco Montoya plays the solo... BTW, the rest of the CD is good also!


Edited to fix all kinds of errors...sorry for the inconvenience...

I was hoping to see Keb' Mo' on the list as well as Gov't. Mule. How about John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers? Their new one, In the Palace of the King is quite nice.



Cher

no allman brothers band? from their debut release until ramblin' man they were (imho) the best live blues band going. they payed proper and due respect to traditional blues and also expanded it into and fused it with freeform jazz and funked-up rock and roll. they were also hugely responsible for helping to bring traditional blues into the forefront of popular culture and radio.

plus they were a damn incredible group of players, that original line-up of duane, gregg, dickey, barry, butch and jaimoe may have been the best, most solid live performing band ever...

ABB-Dreams & ABB-Whippin' Post

dammit.

I'm hardly an expert but the first two Allmans albums and Fillmore East are essential blues listening, I would think. They might not have been purists but nobody played it the way they did with Duane.


And the first person who mentions John effing Mayer in this thread gets a beatdown.

Kudos for Caroline - Hey, that sounds like a great band name!

Caroline found this new band called Back Door Slam. They are some young kids from England and they are awfully reminiscent of a young Eric Clapton... Don't believe me, check out this video from a recent Jimmy Kimmel show.

Jimmy Kimmel Show

Here's their home page: Back Door Slam

Here's their new album I just ordered:



From their "The Band" page:

BACK DOOR SLAM are Davy Knowles (guitars, vocal, mandolin, lap steel), Ross Doyle (drums) and Adam Jones (bass), all hailing from the small-but-perfectly-formed Isle of Man*... (*to find the tiny isle, go to Liverpool and look out to sea - you might even see Douglas bay on a clear day!)

Brought up on a potentially overindulgent appetite of Everything Blues, they're now using their precocious talents to create their own mindblowing brand of contemporary/traditional blues-rock. The result is a sound reminiscent of the greats (BB King, Howlin Wolf, Jimi Hendrix, SRV) but with a big fat nod to the modern music and songwriters they all share a love of (Clapton, Knopfler, Mayall, Mayer).

With this exciting mix fronted by the extra-ordinary vocal and guitaring talent that is Davy K, and armed with a scutch of hit songs under their youthful belts, you won't know whether to holler for joy or scream in envy at the perfect musical package that is Back Door Slam.

Stop by their myspace and say hi sometime!

For a full length biog, visit Blix Street Records.

To contact the band, email:
band(AT)backdoorslam.com


Back Door Slam Bio from their blog site:

“I heard the spirit of Jimi Hendrix coming from the open, streetside windows of a joint called B.D. Riley's. It was ‘Red House,’ executed superbly by a surprisingly young trio called Back Door Slam.” – Patrick MacDonald on Back Door Slam at SXSW in the Seattle Times

Almost everyone, if pressed, can recall some key point in their life when a single event caused them to suddenly and dramatically alter course. To have had such a revelation at age 11 and to have made good on it—turning a spontaneous passion into a serious profession that demands lifelong commitment—now that’s a little out of the ordinary.

“I was in a car with my dad, and he put on Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing,’” explains Davy Knowles, 20-year-old guitarist, singer and principal songwriter of the blues-rock trio Back Door Slam. “I just fell in love with the music then and there. That track changed my life, and I realized, ‘I really want to be able to do that.’ ”

The inspirational moment occurred on the Isle of Man, the tiny kingdom stuck in the middle of the Irish Sea (roughly equidistant from Belfast to the west and Liverpool to the east), where the teenaged trio coalesced—with this particular lineup in 2006. Knowles and drummer Ross Doyle, 20, had played together in a prior version; bassist Adam Jones, 19, was the most recent to join. Taking its name from a song popularized by early inspiration Robert Cray, Back Door Slam, has, however, acted rather swiftly on its intention to make good. Under the guidance of the same IOM-based management team that launched multi-platinum Grammy-nominated Corinne Bailey Rae last year, they have already issued a pair of EPs and a full concert DVD, wowed audiences at the U.S.’s taste-making South by Southwest conference, supported name acts as diverse as Don McLean and Elvin Bishop, and prepared an audaciously impressive debut album, ROLL AWAY, issued by independent Blix Street Records, best known for the catalogue of recordings by the late Eva Cassidy. That release was preceded by the band’s first full American tour.

If conventional wisdom has it that the most popular activity of the young is rebelling against everything that preceded them, it’s wisdom that is in need of some reevaluation. Both the general tradition of the blues and the specific experience of Back Door Slam refute it, in ways that support the linkage of all good music across any expanse of time or space. “Sultans of Swing” got Knowles started on guitar (“I nicked my dad’s acoustic and figured the song out by ear. I must’ve played it for a year.”) and led him to his father’s record collection. “That’s where I found people like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers,” Knowles recalls with obvious fondness, “and, from there, I got into Eric Clapton and Peter Green in the early Fleetwood Mac, and [late Irish axe-man] Rory Gallagher, who I just love. Then I began reading guitar-player magazines and started seeing who the people I was influenced by had listened to, which is how I learned about Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson.”

While classmates spent time tuned in to Metallica or Britney Spears, Knowles “was more into the vintage music.” So were his eventual bandmates. “Ross initially liked indie rock, though he’s really into blues now, and Adam has wide tastes; he likes Jeff Buckley and things like that.” Nor has Knowles pigeon-holed himself; if blues is his bailiwick, he’s also inspired by “English folk music, like Bert Jansch and [Jansch’s Pentangle guitar partner] John Renbourn” and classic soul singers (“Marvin Gaye and especially Ray Charles, who is just incredible and irreplaceable”).

All these elements come into play on ROLL AWAY, which was recorded at DAM Studios in Douglas, the principal city on the Isle of Man, with producer Dave Armstrong (whose credits include fellow Manx music export and renowned songbird Christine Collister). It’s an impressive set, full of stirring blues, bruising rockers and affecting minor-key ballads, that marks Back Door Slam’s as one of the year’s most stunning arrivals “We wanted to make the record as raw as we could,” Knowles says. “Not too many overdubs. We tried our best to get a real live sound.

“We recorded the album on and off over the course of a year, as we were also doing gigs across the U.K., and in France. Some of the songs we’ve had kicking around for a year or more, so this album sort of provided ‘closure’ for a lot of the things we didn’t have a chance to record earlier.”

Among such songs is “Too Late,” whose arrangement alternates between a sparse acoustic-guitar sound and full-blown band dynamics. “That was the first proper song I wrote,” Knowles says with a laugh. “I was on holiday with my parents and didn’t have a guitar for two weeks, so I made friends with this French gypsy guy who hung out at the restaurant we ate at. He lent me his guitar, and I wrote that song.” Of more recent vintage is the somewhat folk-bluesy title track, which shares a similar genesis. “It’s the first song I wrote without a guitar,” Knowles adds. “I was out on a dog walk, and I just got the melody and all the lyrics. Then, I had to put the guitar to it when I got home.”

“Roll Away” addresses the dilemma, he says, of living in such a desirable but off-the-beaten-path locale as the Isle of Man (“Roll away/Maybe I’ll return to this island some day”): “It’s a beautiful place and so nice, but it’s also small and insular in its thinking in a way. I feel lucky to have grown up there, but you can’t forget there’s also a world out there beyond it.”

Other highlights of the program are the tough-riffed “Outside Woman Blues” (the album’s one track not written by Knowles), “Come Home” (“an older one, kind of my first attempt to write a big electric blues”) and “Heavy on My Mind,” which suggests the muscular amplified style of Albert King. “That’s a funny one, actually,” says Knowles. “We were staying at our manager’s house, and it was the creepiest house, with a graveyard and an old battlefield next to it. The line ‘My mind is playing tricks on me,’ came from walking around that house. You know how [in a spooky place] you know there’s nothing there, but you keep looking behind yourself anyway to see if someone’s following you? It was like that.”

“Stay” addresses a more serious subject: the death of Back Door Slam’s rhythm guitarist, Brian Garvey, and another friend, in a car accident in 2004. “It just devastated us,” Knowles recalls. “It took a long time to come to terms with that. Writing ‘Stay’ was a kind of therapy for us.”

As much as the band enjoyed recording its debut long-player, playing live is “definitely where it’s at,” says Knowles. “It’s all I ever wanted to do: go on tour and keep playing.” Which is what Back Door Slam did throughout the spring and summer of 2007. On their Austin stop at SXSW, the musicians ran into a fellow artist with Isle of Man connections. “We got to meet Pete Townshend,” Knowles enthuses. “He was really nice and took time to speak with us. He went to school on the Isle of Man for a bit, and I think he’s still got relatives there.”

The hook-up with the Who man further underscores just how far the young trio has come in such a short time. At the end of May, Back Door Slam performed on the same bill with The Who, as featured guests at the Isle’s first annual Peel Bay Festival. It’s not at all unlikely that their performance on that stage, and on the 11 tracks that comprise the ROLL AWAY album, will wind up affecting music fans just as deeply as “Sultans of Swing” touched Davy Knowles. A tradition continues.

good gravy. I cant believe I missed this thread. I need to come around here more often.

"Also, you need to know that I dig slow blues, blues ballads and acoustic blues. " (says Sko...)

me too...most certainly. I need to try some of what you have listed. Im really hooked on the older stuff... Simply Love Sonny Boy Williamson, Lighnin' Hopkins, BB King, Elmore James, Hooker, etc. Mmmm-mmmm. I just havent been able to really get into Johnny Winter, ABB and the like.. its simply a completely different animal and Im currently digging the older, simpler, often solo, gospel, foot stomping, harp blowing, true blue notes goodness.

dig:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2jOaYkPvug

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNDJF4azgog

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2drsTviOAI...feature=related

Caroline! This CD rocks! Thank you so much for posting about these guys. I cannot quit listening to it.

Best blues album of the year so far!

Think Joe Bonamassa meets Indigenous!

I agree! While there are a number of solid songs that sound early Clapton-esque like Come Home, the song that's getting the most play here in the Philadelphia region, I was not at all expecting the equally enjoyable songs tucked midway through with Knowles on acoustic guitar. Knowles sounds somewhat like Jakob Dylan there to me - softer, still intense, and with a rawness that makes you want to keep listening because he's just got to have more to say....and play.

The others in the band also have that raw, young sound that works together so well, and with the bass player turning 21 this past week (they joyously highlight him becoming "legal" on their website, LOL!), I think we've got lots more music to look forward to.

They're touring the US this summer; my son Jeff and I saw them live and I think they're even better live than on CD.

- Carolyn

Okay, this is just phenomenal. I'm almost speechless. You gotta see all 10 minutes of this if you dig guitar.

Monte Montgomery

Okay, this is the first time I've heard about this guy and he's been around a while. Who's been holdin' out on me? What's his best disc?