Recently, we told you about Chicago bluesman Linsey Alexander’s soulful latest album Two Cats. If you’re in the mood for something of the Chicago variety with a little more swing, you’ll want to check out Royal Mint, the Alligator Records debut for seasoned Midwestern players The Cash Box Kings.
Formed in 2001 by harmonica player Joe Nosek, the band added veteran Chicago vocalist Oscar Wilson six years later, with the two now leading a rotating line-up of band members that includes Billy Flynn and Joel Paterson on guitar, Kenny “Beedy Eyes” Smith, Mark Haines and Alex Hall taking turns on the drum kit, Brad Ber on bass, Mel Ford on rhythm guitar, and newbie Lee Kanehira on piano and organ, filling a void left by late longtime band member and friend Barrelhouse Chuck, who wasn’t well enough to play on this recording (the band’s first without him in ten years) and to whom the album is dedicated.
Together, they produce a delightfully entertaining baker’s dozen of songs, from the swinging, Sugar Ray & the Bluetones-like sounds of the opening “House Party” (Amos Milburn) and Clifton Chenier’s “All Night Long”, both featuring Al Falaschi on saxophone, to the stripped-down Delta blues of Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” that features just Wilson on vocals and Paterson on guitar, to the light breezy ragtime of the closing original “Don’t Let Life Tether You Down”, one of three songs on which Nosek handles vocals, providing such sage advice as “don’t let money run your life, cuz’ greed leads to strife” and “so leave that Facebook alone, and your iPhone at home/ don’t let things tether you down/ don’t let rectangular screens pull you ’round on a string/ don’t let things tether you down”.
Though guitarist/singer Linsey Alexander‘s name may not be one you recognize, his sounds are ones you surely will, combining the southern soul to Midwest stylings of the likes of Otis Clay, Johnny Rawls, and O.V. Wright with the straight-up Chicago blues of Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and Tail Dragger. You get to hear rather distinct examples of each on the first two tracks of Alexander’s latest album Two Cats — his third release for Delmark Records — in the swaying, horns-laced and smooth-vocaled opener “I’m Not Your Problem” and smoky “Where Did You Take Your Clothes Off Last Night” that follows, featuring a dragging, “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues”-ish bass line and some gritty harmonica from Paul Hanover.
Now, Birchwood and his band are back with the follow-up to that successful debut in Pick Your Poison, an intense, often gritty all-original offering that goes a long way in continuing Birchwood’s trajectory as one of the genre’s fastest rising artists. From the thick Hill Country sounds of the opening, fife and drum-driven “Trial By Fire” and T-Model Ford-ish modern day social commentary “Police State” (“Sayin’ you got the right to remain silent/ Seems they got the right, Lord, to remain violent/ Gotta shake these shackles before it’s too late/ Or we’ll be trapped in a police state”) to the New Orleans gospel of “Even the Saved” with its heavy Robert Randolph-like lap steel (an instrument Birchwood learned from Florida neighbor, Texas bluesman Sonny Rhodes) that has all the oomph of a number from a Blues Brothers movie and a funky, swaying “Are Ya Ready?” that demonstrates Jimi Hendrix’s influence on Birchwood to the smoky jazz ballad “Lost in You”, it doesn’t matter which poison you pick, it’s all pretty potent stuff that, when put together, goes down extremely well and is highly infectious.
showtime: Kings & Queens from A to Z contains images of more than 120 mostly blues artists captured during performances that took place from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Chicago, New Orleans, and Memphis, to Tampa, to Switzerland, France, and Sandor’s hometown of Vienna, Austria. Having been taken between 2004 and 2014, the book of course includes photos of many musicians who are no longer with us, including, for example, B.B. King, David Honeyboy Edwards, Koko Taylor, Etta James, Allen Toussaint, Percy Sledge, Michael Burks, James Brown, Willie Kent, Chuck Brown, Solomon Burke, Sharon Jones, and Marva Wright, which alone makes this a worthwhile volume for any true blues fan’s coffee table.
Even those of us seemingly afflicted by “Born Under a Bad Sign” syndrome (you know, where “if it wasn’t bad luck, [we] wouldn’t have no luck at all”) can experience a small stroke of good fortune every once in a while, such as our needing to be in Phoenix a few weekends back for a work meeting and discovering that guitarist John Primer and harmonica player Bob Corritore — who we would later learn first met one another back in the 1970s when Corritore went to see a Primer-supported Junior Wells play — happened to be performing at Corritore’s local blues club The Rhythm Room in conjunction with the pair’s sophomore album Ain’t Nothing You Can Do!, 
Having previously seen these two play together (along with a stageful of other greats including Bob Margolin, Bob Stroger, and the late pianist David Maxwell) during a 
While the resulting recording does see the multi-generational pair (who’ve since adopted the nickname of TajMo for their collaborative work) revisiting one of those songs — a slow, acoustic “Diving Duck Blues” (Sleepy John Estes) that’s so stripped down with just the duo’s guitars and vocals that you can sometimes hear Mahal breathing — as well as a few other bluesy tracks in the pleading opening original “Don’t Leave Me Here” and the bouncy country blues of “She Knows How to Rock Me” (Piano Red) that follows, TajMo (Concord Records) also offers up a number of very pleasant surprises. That includes terrific covers of both The Who’s “Squeeze Box” and John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change”, along with the catchy, memorable originals “All Around the World” and “Soul”.