What does a blues band sound like that has been together for forty years? There is only one way to find out and this CD is it. The addition of Little Charlie Baty was a wonderful move. No guitar player has a more articulate vocabulary in the various blues dialects this side of Duke Robillard. It is Robillard who produced this album. Duke even plays with Charlie on four tunes. When you put together musicians of this caliber with the premier vocalist in the blues, you have really got something special. Songs imbued with timeless imagery, biting satire and humor are delivered by Sugar Ray Norcia. He has sturdy pipes and the phrasing of a master. This band has enjoyed an incredibly consistent recording career but Too Far from the Bar sounds like Sugar Ray and the Bluetones' magnum opus. 

Duke Robillard is a national treasure and he just made his best album in decades. This is why a second-place finish for Blues Bash! is fairly astonishing. However, it is worth noting that Duke’s participation on the Sugar Ray and the Bluetones 2020 album likely pushed that album to its exalted position. The three original sax men from Duke’s Roomful of Blues days make very welcome contributions. They are Doug James on baritone, Greg Piccolo on tenor and Rich Lataille on alto. Roomful of Blues is a musical institution which goes back more than 50 years at this point. They added a distinctive horn driven sound to the blues that had laid dormant for some time. It is back on Blues Bash!

Wilson is as responsible for the blues boom of the 80’s and 90’s as almost anyone. Robillard and Jimmie Vaughan could also be included in that conversation among others. Take Me Back! is classic Kim. Traditional blues sung by a man who might be the most underrated vocalist of his generation, only because he is widely regarded as the best harmonica player of his generation. On Take Me Back! Wilson goes back to the future of the blues which is Jon Atkinson and his Bigtone Studios. Wilson, who turned 70 this week, links the generations and literally stands between Atkinson and those giants of the blues who came before with whom Wilson has worked. I would argue that Wilson is now, and quite frankly has been for some time, one of those giants. Take Me Back! is simply the most recent evidence of this fact. 

This release by the Little Village Foundation is why the label exists in the first place. Found! One Soul Singer brings to our attention this criminally underappreciated talent. Green, a Louisiana native and long-time Los Angeles resident, went up the road to Kid Andersen’s Greaseland Studios and made an album that played to his strengths, which are considerable. Producer Andersen put the right songs and the right musicians in place and made an album that sounds like a recording from the late 60’s and early 70’s. 

This U.K. based ensemble lays out some great jazz-tinged instrumentals behind their guitar slinging leader. This eight piece little big band, sometimes augmented by a Hammond organ, demonstrates their affection for that place where American jazz and blues gets all mixed up in the late 50’s and early 60’s of the last century. The originals written by Corcoran and the band’s drummer fit snugly with very creatively tweaked covers, such as Jimmy Smith’s Back at the Chicken Shack and Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man. What the band does with the gospel/blues standard John The Revelator is simply sublime. 

Hunter, a Colfax, Essex, England, native has carved out a unique niche in the world of vintage American music. His brand of original soul tunes has a connection to the sounds of the King/Federal label’s music of the early 60’s. Picture Hank Ballard and the Midnighters meets Jackie Wilson with Johnny Guitar Watson playing guitar. While that’s probably not fair to anyone, Hunter has truly found the formula for this magic elixir that has yielded one great album after another since way back on 2006’s People Gonna Talk. 

Like Corcoran’s Coolerator, Konstantin Kolesnichenko mines the jazz-soul sounds of the late 50’s and early 60’s but with a decidedly Prestige and Blue Note label feel to these proceedings. This Ukrainian harmonica player has been on a roll lately, Tenderly being his third release of new material since 2016. This recording is in the same vein as 2016’s Hypnotized and 2017’s Minor Differences. Tenderly, like those releases, is a highly recommended, B3 heavy, groove laden offering. 

This is a very strong debut album from what we hope is a rising star in the blues field. This represents the second of three albums produced by Jon Atkinson at his Bigtone Studios to make it into our top ten. Alli is a vocalist and harmonica player who wrote nine of the twelve songs on Hard Workin' Man. The three covers are of tunes by George “Harmonica” Smith, “Big” Walter Horton and “Little” Walter Jacobs. Big Jon’s Bigtone crew includes himself playing guitar and bass. He is also joined by Carl "Sonny" Leyland on piano and Danny Michel on guitar. These musicians offer up sympathetic, solid support to make a modern day, yet traditional blues album of the highest order. 

Mike Flanigin has yet again assembled an organ trio and released an album within those parameters. It doesn’t have the jazzy overtones that one might expect from an ensemble of this nature. West Texas Blues is a flat-out, road house rocker. Flanigin’s B3 is joined by Sue Foley exhibiting some of the best guitar playing of her career. Chris Layton provides solid backing on drums. The entire affair is a barn burner which is a welcome treat here in a year that has us looking forward to a time when we might get out and cut a rug on a wooden dance floor. 

Jones is 32-year-old blues man whose stock is on the rise. This is the third album on this year’s BLUES JUNCTION list of ten best albums of 2020 to be recorded by Jon Atkinson at his Bigtone Studios. Jones is a talented guitarist and effective vocalist. He brought his own band Uptown Stomp from Austin, Texas, to work out some blues standards with Big Jon including the title track by Little Junior Parker, tunes by Eddie Taylor and a full three numbers by Jimmy Rogers. We welcome this young talent to the world of traditional blues.  

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