Contemporary blues and more from harmonica legend

Sugar Blue (born James Whiting) is best known to pop music fans for his harmonica playing on the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You,” but his resume as a blues musician is deep, having played with with Muddy Waters, Brownie McGhee, Roosevelt Sykes, and Willie Dixon throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He recorded a pair of albums as an ex-pat in Paris and returned to the states, where he eventually resumed recording in the mid-90s, laid off for a decade, and picked up a third time with 2007’s Code Blue. Blue grew up in Harlem surrounded by the blue notes of jazz singers, and though his return from Paris landed him in in the company of Chicago’s blues greats, his style remained more fluid and melodic than that which typifies the Windy City’s native harp players.

Blue recalls other instrumentalists without duplicating anyone. He plays runs that suggest the chromatic work of Stevie Wonder and Toots Thieleman, as well as jazz trumpeters and saxophonists, and salutes James Cotton with “Cotton Tree.” His blues are contemporary in melody and arrangement, mixing standard progressions with reggae and funk rhythms, and on “Noel Christmas” he cooks up a New Orleans-style second-line shuffle. His original songs are contemporary in lyric, including “Stop the War,” a funky blues that deftly mixes snippets of famous speeches and news reports with its plea, and “Don’t Call Me” which refers to all manner of modern communication. The Latin-influenced “Average Guy” demonstrates that the daily grind of blue-collar workers can be as oppressive as the down-and-out blues.

The low, slow and pensive “Ramblin’” is a tasty instrumental that has Blue doubling himself on bass harmonica. A pair of covers include a funky version of Junior Wells’ “Messin’ with the Kid” and a hard-Chicago take on Leiber and Stoller’s “Trouble,” memorably performed by Elvis Presley on his 1968 comeback special. The album concludes with the blues-jazz fusion of “Don’t Call Me” and an engaging nineteen-minute interview. Blue’s vocals are strained in spots, but the backing musicians are so adept, and his harmonica playing sufficiently deft as to render this unimportant. Aficionados may find this insufficiently pure for their tastes – there are songs here only peripherally related to the blues – but the quality of Blue’s harp playing and musicality stand tall, whatever the label. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

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