If you woke up this morning with more than $25 in your pocket and did not go to City Winery last night, you messed up. Last night, the legendary blues player John Hammond allowed all watching the extreme pleasure of listening to him play. Hammond, 71, slammed his southern roots blues down with a soulful, baritone voice that misses a note better than most hit them.
Hammond offers the opportunity for people who never had a chance to see guys like Sonny Terry or Big Joe Williams to experience there music. His lack of a backing band, finger picking guitar style and screaming harmonica accompanied by that big voice make one feel as if they are sitting on a porch in the Delta.
Yes, the rhythm may fluctuate here and there but that can be a good thing. A large part of why music is so flavorless these days is that its too on-point. All played to click tracks, recorded and rerecorded, cleaned up by producers the end result too often becomes vanilla, beige, lifeless. Hammond understands that there are no rules in music, rhythm can be bent just like a note; if it sounds good, you’re doing it right.
Between his harp, resonator, acoustic and slide guitar play Hammond touched on all branches of classic unplugged blues all while slipping in these guttural Mingus-esque throat noises that made it seem like it hurt him to release this music from his body; making the gift that much more valuable.
All of these things made Albert Cummings’s job of following Hammond unenviable at best. Cummings, while a talented guitar player and singer, is boring. He plays an innocuous style of the blues that has given the genre a bad name. Cheesy may be the best word for it. Its easy listening blues; an oxymoron really. His music just has no character.
Cummings choice of covers, especially when compared to Hammond’s, may sum it up best. Hammond covered only the masters, Blind Willie McTell, Howlin Wolf, etc., Cummings covered the still overplayed Allman Brothers track, Midnight Rider. In a fitting contrast, Hammond also covered Sleepy John Estes’s I Ain’t Gonna Be Worried No More which the Allman Brothers famously covered with there song Trouble No More.
The blues is not about perfection, its not about skill, its about passion, its about emotion. The blues is not a genre of music as much as a shared feeling. John Hammond gets that.
