The Blues Enthused Christmas Stocking 2016 - Part 2

Christmas dinner fully digested?  Good, because here come few more platters of goodies.
You could call 2016 the Year of the Nimmos.  If Stevie Nimmo came up with my favourite studio album of 2016, his brother Alan’s outfit King King released a live album to rank alongside classics of the genre.   To put the icing on the cake, I was there at the Glasgow O2ABC gig in May when it was recorded, so I can testify to the fact that King King Live captured all the crackling intensity of that night.

Jo Harman lets her hair down

The support act on that tour, Dan Patlansky, turned plenty of heads with his live performances.  He also delivered an album, Introvertigo, that emphasised the waves made by its predecessor, Dear Silence Thieves - way more modern than your average blues-rocker, Boo Boo.  Wondering what sounds King King and Patlansky might make if they played together?  Well here they are, giving it big licks on the last night of that tour, with ‘Little Wing’.

A more rough and ready purveyor of originality was Big Boy Bloater, with his album Luxury Hobo.  Founded on R’n’B shot through with pub-rock Estuary Englishness, it still manages to fold in some other musical horizons.  Sadly I had to miss out on an opportunity to see Bloater live.  But the Bloat also does a nice line in quirky videos, so here he is with his band the Limits giving us ‘I Love You (But I Can’t Stand Your Friends)’.  Ah yes, a good old fashioned ‘brackets’ title!

Summertime brought the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, one of the highlights of which was Mr Sipp, the self-styled Mississippi Blues Child.  Now here is a guy who knows how to take classic electric blues and put on a show full of personality.  Check out this award-winning performance from the 2014 International Blues Challenge for evidence.

Vintage Trouble go native in Glasgow

From the Jazz & Blues Festival to the Edinburgh Blues’N’RockFestival, which furnished an early sighting of local band The Rising Souls in their newly electrified four-piece incarnation.  By the time the autumn came they were releasing a new four-track EP - featuring the title track 'Set Me Free' in the course of an impressively taut launch gig full of brand new material.  If you fancy the idea of Led Zeppelin having a love affair with Aretha Franklin, as they put it, then keep tabs on them in 2017.

Singer-songwriter and soul siren Jo Harman also pitched up at the Blues’N’Rock Festival, walking a tightrope between hold-your-breath sensitive ballads and shake-yer-booty bluesy soul.  Next year is a big one for Harman, whose much-touted second studio album People We Become is scheduled for release in February.  Three years have passed since her widely applauded debut Dirt On My Tongue, and it’s time for her to live up to her promise.  Here she is giving it plenty on ‘Through TheNight’.

What better way to close the Christmas Stocking than with American soul’n’blues stirrers Vintage Trouble?  Blues Enthused will actually be seeing out the year with them at their New Year’s Eve gig at the Sage Gateshead, and if they’re as good as they were at the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow during the summer then it should be a helluva Hogmanay party.  Get in the festive mood with VT in festival mode, at Glastonbury 2015.

Mr Sipp - Spiegeltent, Edinburgh, 18 July 2016

It’s showtime, folks!  It may be a Monday, but in terms of entertainment Mississipian Mr Sipp (aka Castro Coleman) is a veritable Mr Saturday Night, his guitar playing imbued with grinning, duck-walking, strutting, face-pulling enthusiasm.

You want to know what he sounds like?  The second song tonight is ‘Thrill Is Gone’, doffing his cap to BB King, whose jazz-tinged single-note soloing is echoed frequently in the course of the set.  And speaking of jazz inflections, the rhythm section of Jeff Flanagan on bass and Stanley Dixon Jr on drums bring plenty swing to proceedings. Dixon in particular highlights his inventiveness and lightness of touch in the course of a couple of brief solo spots.

Mr Sipp - gettin' jiggy wit it

But BB isn’t the only King that springs to mind, as Sipp shows a liking for the kind of funk groove that Albert King achieved when making Born Under A Bad Sign with the Stax soul gang – and indeed amps it up even further on the likes of ‘Nobody’s Bisness’.  It’s good time music, and with his infectious energy Sipp has no trouble getting the audience to sing and clap along on demand.  But it’s not just the vibe that’s important – his guitar work lives up to those influences with its clarity and variety, notes winging in from odd angles in witty fashion.

“Can I keep it rolling?”, he asks between songs, his gospel background suffusing the performance with an eagerness to engage the audience in the whole experience.  And Sipp acknowledges his twenty plus years as a gospel performer with ‘I’m In Your Care Right Now’, a slower spiritual on which he underlines the quality of his soulful singing as he lets his voice wander in controlled fashion.  He also demonstrates his soul credentials by taking to a  keyboard for a rendition of Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ – a better choice, to my mind, than the overly smooth soul outings he’s been known to produce once or twice on album.

The opening of ‘Miss Jones’ is one of the few occasions when Sipp’s playing feels like it’s starting to meander, with an overlong intro and one or two superfluous licks during the opening verse.  But he promptly blows any concerns away with a circumnavigation of the Spiegeltent, during which he shakes hands and puts an arm round punters for selfies, playing away all the time with his left hand, before bringing the song to a driving conclusion.

The set peaks with the following cover of ‘Smokestack Lightnin’’, a breezy rendition so different from the haunting style of the Howlin’ Wolf original that it’s the cue to get the audience up and dancing – including one enthusiastic fella who’s invited up on stage to shake his booty along with Sipp.

By the time he’s done, Mr Sipp has made it clear just why he received a Blues Music Award this year for his album The Mississippi Blues Child – and still clearer why, in a live setting, he won the International Blues Challenge a couple of years back.  The man’s a dynamite blues guitarist, and a natural born entertainer to boot.