MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: JOHN MAYALL'S BLUESBREAKERS - LIVE IN 1967

A new low in fidelity, but a Dead Sea Scrolls for British blues fans.  A legendary incarnation of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, this band existing for only three months, before Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie scuppered off to form Fleetwood Mac.  No high quality recordings were ever made of the band, but one fan from Holland did follow them around London for five shows with a basic mono reel-to-reel tape deck.  He just set up in the clubs and recorded, and not very well.  Vocals are muffled, there's little colour or clarity, and that's after much modern restoring.

The real excitement here is hearing Peter Green in a blues guitar hero setting.  Each night, he had to hold the spot that Eric Clapton had filled before, during the "Clapton is God" era, and prove himself the equal.  He's up for the challenge, never laying back, being the fast-fingered master on Looking Back, holding the sad notes on So Many Roads, accented with slashes and stabs.

For what we can hear of Mayall, he sounds like a killer front man, and perhaps his reputation has been neglected over the years as more focus has been on his famous sidemen.  This is easily a set I'd be thrilled with seeing today, peppered with Otis Rush and Freddie King numbers, the players seriously in synch.  I've heard much better bootlegs, but not many better performances.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: ALABAMA SHAKES - SOUND & COLOR

This is wilder and more experimental, but just as damn catchy as the band's breakthrough debut.  Still hearts full of soul, the band chops it up and takes the music in directions previously inconceivable.  Hearing the nasty, fuzzy guitar turn into clock chimes at the end of Dunes is the smallest, yet coolest example of innovation and surprise on the disc.

The weapon that is Brittany Howard is even more powerful here.  Her performance on Gimme All Your Love is a showstopper, a classic vocal that is part Etta James, part Macy Gray, which builds and builds in intensity each time the chorus is given back to her. Wonderfully, the songs never stay still.  What starts out as a ballad will morph into something funky.  The goal seems to be to never play it straight.  But even with these delightful and odd turns, you can still hear the basics of the song and style.  Guess Who would make a great Philly soul number. with its driving rhythm guitar chords and melodic bass line, but here come some outer space strings and fractured percussion.

The Greatest is the wildest cut here, as somehow the group has turned it into a punk tune.  On a soul album.  That's what success can do for you sometimes, give you the confidence to go farther, to throw away the rules.  A triumph.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: BROCK ZEMAN - PULLING YOUR SWORD OUT OF THE DEVIL'S BACK

Gruff-voiced and noir-tinged, Ottawa-area troubadour Zeman is at home in a folk setting but is equally edgy. He's a story-teller, an observer who sings real-life struggles about characters you care about.


10 Year Fight is shot through with sadness, about a father who has seen his family torn apart. With a mournful cello behind, it's like early Tom Waits. But then Zeman turns up the volume, adds slide guitar, a hard smack from the drums, and Drop Your Bucket puts the alternative in roots music. Now he's Springsteen in a bad mood. Closing tune Everybody Loves Elvis is an emotional gut punch about the power of music, where Zeman wants to know what kind of song plays on your radio; "Does it steal away your breath, does it knock you off your feet, does it blow your hair back, or make your heart skip a beat?"


That's the kind of song that plays on my radio.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: BRIAN WILSON - NO PIER PRESSURE

As much as I love the beautiful melodies and harmonies of Brian Wilson, the syrup is way too thick on this collection.  Attempting to be part of the modern pop world, the 72-year old gives it a go with guests Nate Ruess of .fun, Kacey Musgraves, Sabu and She & Him, with everything from dance to country in the mix.  Nothing takes off, and the songs are all mediocre at best.  Wilson himself sounds pretty good, his voice at the strongest its been since his comeback, but this is sterile and bland. 

Writing with Joe Thomas, who has been involved in many of Wilson's project over the past 25 years, including the recent Beach Boys reunion album, seems to be one of the chief problems.  These are just minor-league efforts, with hack lyrics.  Seriously, they make Kokomo sound like Good Vibrations.  Every once in a while, touches of Wilson's instrumental genious comes through, but it's no surprise that the best song here is an instrumental, Half Moon Bay.  It's nice that Beach Boys colleagues David Marks, Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin contribute, and certainly Jardine sounds the best he has in many years, but it's pointless to sound great on a dumb song. 

Somewhere Quiet is a return to the old 50's/Four Freshman sound which influenced Wilson in the first place, and it works pretty well.  I wonder if he could have made a Sinatra album such as Dylan just did?  Really though, Capitol's Don Was, who has worked with Wilson several times before, should have put a halt to these proceedings and told Wilson it just wasn't worth it to his reputation.  And what happened to those sessions Wilson did with Jeff Beck a couple of years back, anyway?  Could they have been worse?  This smells like everybody wanted to have this album out before the well-reviewed Wilson biopic Love and Mercy hits theatres in June. 

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: KEVIN BREIT - ERNESTO AND DELILAH

In the folk tradition, the older and more obscure the song, the better. And if you happen to discover a long-lost song, that's a treasure. Imagine finding out about an entire genre, with a century of recordings and a rich, obscure history waiting to be popularized? Man, every Avett brother and Lomax son would be drooling.


That's what Kevin Breit did with his 2012 album Field Recording, introducing us to the ancient and still-active players of the Upper York Mandolin Orchestra, under the guidance of the great Thomas Dooley, third-generation leader of a grand band of mandolin, mandola, and mandocello players. The rich, wonderful sounds of those antique and beautiful wooden works of art rang through the disc, delicious chords and spectacular trills and thrills from the massed strings.


Except not a whit of it was true. The orchestra was all Breit, as was the conceit. But the album was all real, and the real deal too. He had conceived of something new, a special sound of mandolins (and acoustic bass) leaning precipitously on the edge, dipping back and forth between the past and present, history and fact, today's musical smarts and yesterday's beauty.


So that's why one of North America's premiere guitar innovators (think Tom Waits as a guitar player rather than a singer) is still firing away on eight and more strings. This time, it's a double album, two distinct parts, with two different stories to tell. Ernesto is the continuation of the collaboration between Dooley and Breit, but this time on a trip to Rio. Dooley, it seems, has finally succeeded in acquiring the rights to the great Brazilian composer Ernesto Ciari's work. This disc is all instrumental.


Delilah is, surprisingly, all true. It's an album of duets with the similarly-talented Toronto vocalist Rebecca Jenkins, a collaboration much on Breit's mind for some time. Here he pairs his quirky charms with a willing participant. The delightful stories are full of rich tales and characters such as Murderous Dimitri and Henry Marx, playing the marxophone of course. Once again history and present day merge. Then's there's the rather other-worldly sensation caused by listening to two albums of mandolin music. I doubt Breit is bold enough to suggest he's invented new folk music, so I'll do it for him.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: KAIA KATER - SORROW BOUND

Kaia Kater is one of the rising stars in traditional folk comes from Toronto via Quebec, playing North American banjo music from both sides of the border. With a mix of old-time and original tunes, it's hard to tell which is 19th century and which is all hers.


Kater is just 21, and has already absorbed the Appalachian style, that haunting and sorrowful form of traditional ballad, with roots as deep as they go. Even her lyrics reflect the old speech patterns, on numbers such as When Sorrows Encompass Me Round. Although she's made a study of the Appalachian style (even going to school in West Virgina), she's one of the few to bring Canada into the equation. Here she sings in french on the traditional Quebec song En filant ma Quenouille,


On her instrumentals, Kater picks and trills along, best at dueling with producer Chris Bartos on fiddle. Other than those instruments and voices, there is just the occasional touch of the modern, a production effect here and there. Kater seems already accomplished; it will be grand to watch her grow over the next few years, to see where her gifts take her.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: THE SUN HARMONIC - AFTER WE FLY

The Sun Harmonic is one of the many projects for Toronto-based Kaleb Hikele. He`s led rock bands, been a folk performer, and helped create an artist collective, as well as solidifying his creative empire by building a downtown studio. Now, he returns to his first instrument, the piano, to create this body of songs on the new set After We Fly.

It`s actually a sampler for a bigger work to come, a wide-ranging double album he`s preparing for 2016, called Winter. So this has the alternate title of 8 Winter Songs. How snowy the whole thing gets remains to be recorded, but for now After We Fly is a tempting treat. Hikele knows full well how to make modern, delicious tracks, rich in melody and intricately composed. What he avoids here is the temptation to chop it all up and dose it in trickery and finery. Instead, each song has as its main instrument the piano, so sadly out of fashion in most genres. Yet here it is in all its glory, chords and triplets and trills and tremolos.



That's not to say he doesn't embellish; there are lots more instruments, even some effects, but those glorious melodies came straight from the old Joanna. He introduces jazz moves, classical ideas, and lush pop, with cello, trumpet, and a grand chorus of voices among the guests. With a fine, soothing voice as well, Hikele has done wonders for the piano player.