[Guitar] Chris Rea - (2004) The Blue Jukebox

On the twisty, slippery road to appreciating Jazz, I think Chris Rea will be a big help to us. His career took a radical turn a few years ago when he decidedly moved away from popular music. This album, to my mind one of the best he recorded in his transitional phase, is the perfect link for us between smokey voiced 'bad guy' Blues like Calvin Russell and Jazz.

Chris Rea - The Blue Jukebox
Guitar - 2004
1 CD - 13 tracks
Total running time: 1:06:56

Chris adds a taste of Jazz to The Blues in this CD where he growls in a deep, smokey voice with his usual strong bass line and slide guitar licks but in a more laid back, reflective mood.

Chris Rea's career

Most people probably know Chris Rea as the guy you hear on the radio every year around Christmas time with his Driving Home for Christmas. People who were alive and in contact with the world in the 80s will know him as the artist behing big popular hits like The Road to Hell, Auberge, Josephine, Looking for the Summer... After his initial huge success, he disappeared completely in the 90s and produced some truely AWFUL albums.

His great comeback came in 2002 when he released Dancing down the Stony Road, recorded "live in the studio", i.e. one take tracks. Chris created his own record company called Jazzy Blue and released an extended version of that album with his new company. He has released a whole flurry of albums since, now having the freedom of release what and when he wants. The result is, in my opinion, a dramatic improvement in his music. He has now turned to a genre you could call "Dark Blues" and The Blue Jukebox is a great example of it.

Overall character of the album

Chris is faithful to his usual sound instrument-wise in this album: his voice, slide guitar, bass and a slow blues shuffle on the drums. The novelty is the appearance of a saxophone which occasionnally softly fills in between the guitar and the voice, adding a destinct Jazzy tone.

Athmosphere-wise, The Blue Jukebox is Dark Blues at its best. Technically, the music is simple, very rootsy, no ornaments, no excessive multiple tracking. Every sound you hear has its function and would be noticeably missed were it to be left out. The mood produced is slow, weary, dreamy. The album musically describes to perfection the feeling of "being blue". The difference to traditional Blues is that it's not the groans of someone trying to free himself of this unfortunate state of mind but simply a description of it and a much more expressive and moving description than words. The Blue Jukebox is a very accurate title for this CD: it is the sound of "blue".

Highlights of this CD

The most easily likeable track is certainly Long Is the Time and Hard Is the Road. Lyrically the song is quite similar to Chris's old hit The Road to Hell. He criticises the way society works, showing how fake and meaningless our way of living is, leading us to self negation. However, unlike the old hit, he doesn't express his anger and his wish to change this, he simply describes the sadness he feels towards the situation. Musically this is expressed by a strong, warm and slow bass line. The anger which used to be his screaming, screeching guitar, is replaced by a gently weaping slide guitar. I must say you have to give credit to Chris for his performance on guitar on this album. It takes a great deal of subtely to express deep sadness and yet keep the sound gentle and soft.

Steel River Blues is another of my favourites on this release. Musically it's quite similar to Long Is the Time... but underlines a certain fascination in the feeling of sadness. He speaks of "The only thing we never got to do
Kick away
Those Steel River Blues"
as if he was trapped in his sadness. As if he couldn't bear being happy, that he prefered staying in his familiar and gentle world of sadness.

The only song that expresses desire to escape the world of the Blues is Restless Soul. Contrary to all the other tracks, the rythm is punchy: the bass angrily beats a very restless rythm. You get the impression the person's soul is damned, condemned to be imprisonned in sadness: "Oh you gotta give somethin'
'Cos it screams and it cries
This restless soul"
The song ends with a really impressively well executed duo of saxophone and slide guitar.

Last words

I think this album is a great introduction to the bluesy/jazzy mood. In his lyrics, Chris often speaks of a "blue world" or "a little piece of blues" as if the blues could be sensed in every situation. Even in a happy event, you can catch a glimpse of sadness which you can be fascinated by, attracted by because of its familiarity giving you a sense of security.

The song Paint My Jukebox Blue offers a fatalistic but also humourous point of view on this. Confronted with a serious problem a person goes and even gratefully escapes to familiarity of the "blue world". In the song, the person decides to paint his jukebox blue which is a stupid thing to do really but, symbollically, very interesting: "Since you been gone
I've been wondering
What to do
I guess I'll paint
My Jukebox
Blue...."

Tracklist

No.	Title	Len.
1	The Beat Goes on	4:34
2	Long Is the Time Hard Is the Road	5:19
3	Let's Do It	5:04
4	Let It Roll	5:01
5	Steel River Blues	4:36
6	Somebody Say Amen	6:13
7	Blue Street	4:50
8	Monday Morning	4:07
9	Restless Soul	5:53
10	What Kind of Love Is This	6:39
11	Paint my Jukebox Blue	4:03
12	Baby Don't Cry	5:25
13	Speed	5:04

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[Guitar] Calvin Russell - (1991) Sounds from the Fourth World

Let's move away from Mark Knopfler but stay in familiar territory with this second CD. This album also very guitar orientated but has a rawer, rootsier, more Texas/Country/Blues feel to it. A good prelude to the Blues up ahead in our reviews, while staying very melodic and accessible.

C.R. Sounds from the 4th World
Guitar - 1991
1 CD - 11 tracks
Total running time: 49:31

The pains and groans of a man hard done by life, brought to us by a deap, growly voice accompanied by a roughly strummed acoustic guitar and a heavily distorted electric guitar.

The artist & the album

The album's cover gives a pretty good impression of what Calvin Russell looks like and indeed, sounds like: rough, dirty, bitter, hardened by life. As far as I was able to find out, Calvin is from Texas, an ex-convict, and in general, a rather ragged fellow.

Now from that description, you might be expecting some typical 'bad guy' music but that's not to be found anywhere on this album at least. Calvin communicates his ideas quite subtely, using both musical and lyrical effects. However, unlike Mark's recent work, it stays very raw, with some rough, hard sounds and dark, bluesy melodies. I think the primary quality of this album is that it's honest: it's a real bloke who's been through a lot, telling us stories from his life without pretending to be something he isn't. So the music, just like the man, is rough around the edges, sometimes clumbsy but allthemore convincing for that very reason.

To his advantage, Calvin has a very deep growly voice which fits perfectly with the themes of his songs. Along with his rough, clumbsy acoustic guitar strumming and his howling, screaming electric guitar licks, it gives the album a very characteristic sound, a sound giving the ideas and the lyrics a certain credibility, a credibility one of these young kid superstars with their flashy shows and fancy tricks could never have.

A few favourite songs

The second track on the album is Last Night, the story of a guy who is obsessed with some woman and goes out looking for her in the bars at night to see what she's doing, who she's with. While the subject is neither very profound nor very original, the song is very nicely pieced together. The textures are good: rough and dirty as always with Calvin but they fit particularly well in this situation where an old, rough looking dog is running after some smart looking lady. The lyrics are quite vague but mention the important things like "Afraid I would find you, Afraid you couldn't be found" which is the typical thought you have when you're looking for someone. Finding her would be awkward and painful and not finding her would be just as bad because you wouldn't know where she is and start imagining the worst things. The details of the situation are not explained which allows everyone to interpret it how it suits him but the feelings are explained in detail: bitterness in the verse "The kind where you gotta dress right or they won't let you in" and pain and anger in "And you do the same damn thing to me". That last verse is one of the key moments in the song, the singing is particularly emotional and it's followed by a screaching, screaming lick on a heavily distorted electric guitar.

The next song, One Meat Ball, is one of my all time favourites when it comes to the 'Blues feel'. A poor fellow finds a dollar bill somewhere and wanders around restaurants to see what he can get to eat for 1 dollar. It turns out all he can get for that price is 1 meat ball. The situation is very silly but the thoughts racing through the little man's mind as he sits alone at his table and timidly orders his 1 meat ball aren't at all. Obviously, the waiter laughs at the poor guy when he takes the order and makes a big joke of it with the rest of the staff. There are two versions of this song on the album: acoustic with saxophone and an electric one. Each has its own qualities but the musical textures in both, wonderfully express how this little man sinks down deeper and deeper into his chair and into the floor in total humiliation, as the staff and the other guests in the restaurant laugh at him. That is, for me, the perfect example of what the Blues is about. Musically, the song hasn't got much to do with the Blues but the theme, a simple, everyday situation which emotionally turns into someone's worst nightmare, is the essence of any Blues song. One Meat Ball is the kind of song that makes you feel less ridiculous when you feel down just because the girl at the cash desk didn't say hello when you went shopping in the morning.

Calvin Russell's most successful song is Crossroads which is also on this album. It's a long acoustic thing which builds up to a dramatic solo at the end. The story is a guy standing at some crossroads wondering which road to take, an image for someone thinking over an important decision he has to take in life (just like that very tiresome Robert Frost poem, The Road not Taken). The voice is the star in this song. Calvin's deep, dark voice reflects the seriousness of the decisions to take in life, and the desasterous effects they can have. The voice is accompanied by a slow, reflective, acoustic riff all the way. The song ends with a magnificent acoustic guitar solo.

Tracklist

No.	Title	Len.
1	You're my Baby	3:45
2	Last Night	4:44
3	One Meat Ball	3:54
4	Crossroads	7:32
5	Maybe Someday	5:34
6	Rockin' the Republicans	4:40
7	Baby I Love You	2:21
8	Love Stealer	4:12
9	You Don't Know Me	5:07
10	Down Down Down	3:41
11	One Meat Ball (acoustic)	3:57

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