Rick Estrin is on the short list of greatest harmonica players in the world. He is also on that same list as a songwriter. Intelligence, irony and wit are his calling cards and he deals them with deft precision on Contemporary. It is one of the many reasons to celebrate this September, 20^th, Alligator Records release by Rick Estrin & the Nightcats.

Those other reasons have much to do with Estrin’s marvelous band. They remain one of the premier blues ensembles working today. They put Estrin’s material in a smart, sophisticated, uptown urban package that is distinctive. It also fits, albeit a very snug fit at times, within the agreed upon parameters of the blues tradition.

As can be expected Kid Andersen wears a lot of hats. He, of course, is the band’s esteemed guitarist and has been for just over ten years now. He also co-produced the album. He recorded and mixed the entire affair at his Greaseland studios. He handles the upright bass duties on four tracks. He also wrote one of the album’s three instrumentals. It is a Little Milton inspired number appropriately entitled House of Grease.

Estrin is again in the company of long time Nightcat organist and pianist Lorenzo Farrell. He wrote a wonderful instrumental, Cupcaking, on the album in that blues/jazz vein that I dig so much. His contributions on both instruments on Contemporary are indispensable.

Contemporary features a change in the drummer’s chair. The wonderful Norwegian drummer Alex Petersen had been splitting time betwixt Oslo and San Jose. He plays on half the tracks. Former and current Nightcat Derrick D’Mar Martin leaps in and lands in the driver’s seat without so much as missing a beat.

Any album, regardless of the fine musicianship and execution (there is plenty of both here), is only as good as the songs that are being performed. Here we have 12 songs and fifty minute’s worth of great material most of it written by the great Rick Estrin. There isn’t a clunker in the bunch.

With tongues firmly planted in their collective cheeks, and with just the right amount of cheeky humor I might add, Rick Estrin & the Nightcats discuss the virtues of being contemporary on the album’s title track. Just like his 2012 song (I met her on) The Blues Cruise on the Nightcats’ album One Wrong Turn, the people Rick Estrin and company are lampooning are so self-absorbed and clueless they won’t get the joke and those that do will have a good laugh. See, nobody gets hurt. Ignorance is bliss and unfortunately is running rampant in the blues world.

I’m very glad that Rick Estrin & the Nightcats are having none of that. The album Contemporary once again proves this fact. Fresh, creative and rooted in decades old blues traditions is the brand that Rick Estrin & the Nightcats have created and they remain its most consistent practitioners.

-  David Mac