That's the functional overview—blues with a feeling—and the heart of this review. But the Columbia blues package is the most important blues release in years, so we'll go over it record by record.
the material which accompanies the Bessie Smith albums. Columbia admits to having altered their earlier blues reissues (including the first Robert Johnson album, and the four original Bessie Smith albums) by adding electronic echo to the original masters to give them that "hi-fi" sound. This practice has been discontinued, and if you compare matching tracks on the old Bessie Smith albums and the new ones you'll notice that the new albums sound immeasurably liver, clearer and finer. The new Robert Johnson album, too, is a delight fidelity-wise.
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Otis Spann was a Mississippi bluesman, Muddy Waters' half-brother, and the finest blues pianist that ever lived. Spann's singing was sometimes a little too stylized, but his rolling, driving piano was always gloriously right. This was his first album; out of print for many years, it's been blessedly reissued on Barnaby (a Columbia subsidiary). Spann was somewhat over-recorded (like Lightnin' Hopkins), and as a result there is a large body of albums with material that probably felt good at the time, but doesn't hold up too well. This one is beautiful—not an unnecessary note nor a dull track from the beginning of side one to the last tinkle on side two. Spann was a Chicago musician, but the Mississippi roots were always strong in his music; the stuff works.
Robert Lockwood Jr. (a worthy blues musician in his own right) backs Spann on guitar, and sings on a couple of tracks where Spann backs him. Actually, I like Lockwood's singing better than Spann's, but the piano-guitar duets on "Take A Little Walk With Me" and "Rambling On My Mind" are so fine that the vocals are almost beside the point—Spann and Lockwood are just as together as Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, but where Scrapper went in for jazzy up-the-neck pyrotechnics, Lockwood digs down for the slow, dirty blues; and where Carr played regulation boogie-woogie, Spann rips off rolling Chicago left-hand basement back-up—sometimes sounding like Robert Johnson, and never letting you forget that the blues grow out of deep pain.
When Spann steps out front, his piano sings—high, sliding runs, so fluid they suggest bottleneck guitar; Spann knew how to play in between the cracks. Other times he kee
It's packages like this that turn ordinary music lovers into cynics: First, Legacy bundled mythic bluesman Robert Johnson's entire recorded output into the 1990 two-disc collection The Complete Recordings, and since then the label has unbundled the limited trove for different single volumes -- one for the Martin Scorsese Blues project, now two patterned after the original LP releases. Each of these gets a "bonus" track previously available only on the Complete set -- here, it's the second take of "Ramblin' on My Mind," which is a mighty morsel, not a meal. As there's no sonic upgrade or vault gem, stay away from this, and seek out The Complete Recordings instead.
