Sweet Blood Call

Album review

At the time this album was recorded, the particularly intense blues artist Louisiana Red was a protégé of the Blue Labor/Labor recording empire, which was actually two guys, Kent Cooper and jazz arranger and composer Heiner Stadler. Cooper's involvement with Red led, as in many cases of blues producers and their clients, to co-authorship on some of the songs recorded. Cooper and Stadler regarded Red as an artist cut from the same cloth as John Lee Hooker or Lightning Hopkins, and of the same quality -- meaning an intense, mood-setter of a bluesman with a sizzling improvisatory style. They were certainly accurate in their appraisal of his talent, and their interest in recording Red led to several classic blues albums. The fine studio sound they got on these solo recordings makes for a superior album, and it was the first Red would record unencumbered by a combo backing him up. Every nuance of his playing is captured, and he is definitely the type of blues player who thrives on solo work. He rarely sticks to a formula bar structure and likes to stretch out his licks as if casting out a line for fish, but he isn't a player who just stays on one chord like Hooker often did. One of Red's original blues, in which he describes how his wife died of cancer, has got to set some kind of a record for misery described in a blues song, meaning it is the saddest of the sad.

© Eugene Chadbourne /TiVo