The 72-year-old Delta bluesman’s Auerbach-produced Cypress Grove captures the raucous sounds of the juke joint.
Bluesman Jimmy “Duck” Holmes is an American treasure. The 72-year-old is the foremost torchbearer of a deep and esoteric style of Mississippi Delta music associated with the town where he has spent his entire life: rural Bentonia. He’s also the proprietor of the nation’s longest operating juke joint, the Blue Front Café, which his parents established there in 1948. Holmes learned the Bentonia blues style at the side of its originators, including Henry Stuckey and the more famous Skip James, who had a renaissance during the ’60s folk blues revival. Every year in June, Holmes celebrates the music that’s in his DNA by hosting the Bentonia Blues Festival on his family’s farm.
But there’s a less formal celebration every weekend, when the Blue Front stays open late, cold beer flows like rain, and the music gets loud, raucous, and unpredictable. That’s the spirit that producer Dan Auerbach has captured on Holmes’ new album, Cypress Grove.
The song we’re premiering, “All Night Long,” is a robust, free-ranging original built along the thorny backbone of Holmes’ guitar, with interjections by Auerbach, adding fills and commentary, and an essay on hot-butter slide by Marcus King. The album is packed with 6-string highlights, built around Holmes’ rusty freight-train rhythms and tonal surprises, like the feedback drone Auerbach makes sing like an Indian tanpura on the title track.
In Nashville’s Easy Eye Sound studio, Auerbach and Holmes run through the bones of one of Holmes’ durable culled-from-life numbers before showing it to the studio band and firing up the tape recorder.
Just because the album was recorded at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville doesn’t mean it’s not authentic down-home Mississippi blues. The Black Keys’ frontman explains his modus operandi: “I like to work with people who inspire me, and Jimmy inspires me. Jimmy’s music is rough and tumble, and it can shatter a lot of preconceptions purists have about Delta blues. At the Blue Front, you never know who’s going to show up, or what instrument they’ll be playing. There could be three guitars, bass, drums, mandolin, and fiddle one weekend, and then the next weekend a banjo player or a saxophonist shows up. So the sound always reflects the ages and experiences and styles of the musicians who are there, and that keeps it fresh, modern, and totally unpredictable.”
In addition to Dan Auerbach and Marcus King, Holmes’ new album includes contributions from Mississippi blues bass MVP Eric Deaton and drummer Sam Bacco, who is a percussionist in the Nashville Symphony.
If you’d like to know more about Bentonia blues and Jimmy “Duck Holmes,” check out our interview with him from September 2016. And you can also dig into Ryan Lee Crosby’s Bentonia Blues lesson from September 2019.
The beloved guitarist is performing on his farewell tour in top form, bringing us a blues classic written by his mother’s favorite composer.
In 1966, Peter Frampton began his professional career in England at age 16 when he joined the Herd. Now, more than 50 years later, as he celebrates a hugely successful solo career, not to mention an epic run with Humble Pie, the beloved guitarist is currently on his Farewell Tour, playing music from his latest album, All Blues, which has stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard Blues Albums Chart for 14 weeks.
This live performance video we’re premiering here was recorded at the Ameris Bank Amphitheatre in Alpharetta, Georgia, on August 11. “This is the first music we have filmed from my Farewell Tour,” Frampton told us.
The tune featured is a cover of “Georgia on My Mind,” one of the tracks from All Blues. The classic song, made famous by Ray Charles, was written in 1930 by Hoagy Carmichael, who is Frampton’s mother’s favorite songwriter. “I couldn’t believe when I looked up who wrote ‘Georgia,’” Frampton says. “It’s the standard: I’ve heard Ray Charles kill it, I’ve heard Steve Winwood kill it. I would never attempt to sing this song—there’s just too many great versions by so many great singers. Being that I have a desire to play guitar, I decided we would do this as an instrumental.”
Frampton announced in February that this tour would be his last, revealing that he was diagnosed with a degenerative muscular disease called inclusion body myositis, a rare and incurable condition that causes muscles to weaken slowly. Frampton says he does feel the effects of this condition in his body, but thankfully his guitar playing has not been affected yet. As you can see from this live clip, Frampton’s tone and phrasing are just as beautiful as ever.
Frampton’s Farewell Tour ends this month at a sentimental spot near San Francisco, where his career comes full circle. The wildly popular and critically acclaimed Frampton Comes Alive! was recorded at various venues in 1975, including San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. The double-live album was released in 1976 and went on to become one of the best-selling live albums in history.
An amazingly exploratory performance that ties together a lost colleague, a fabled basement club, and some breathtaking improvisations.
Few musical situations are as intimate and rewarding as playing in a duo. All your thoughts and energy are focused on reacting to how another human is interpreting time, feel, and tone. For guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan, that connection is deep and thankfully documented on their latest ECM album, Epistrophy, which is out on April 12th. It’s a continuation of the duo’s previous album for the label, Small Town, and actually was recorded at the same week-long gig at jazz’s most hallowed of halls, the Village Vanguard, in March of 2016.
Although Morgan and Frisell are a generation apart, several common threads connect them. For many years Frisell had a yearly engagement at the Vanguard with his wildly exploratory trio with saxophonist Joe Lovano and shape-shifting drummer Paul Motian. Sadly, Motian passed away in November of 2011 but the sessions for his last album, Windmills of Your Mind, brought Frisell and Morgan together in a quartet with vocalist Petra Haden for an incredible set of standards. “I first met Thomas well before that,” says Frisell. “Joey [Baron] wanted to go over the music for an album [1999’s We’ll Soon Find Out] before Ron Carter got there. Thomas came and played everything just dead-on perfect. Plus, he looks younger than he is, so I thought, ‘Wow, this little kid just came in here and slayed this music.’” (Pro tip: Always prepare for a rehearsal as if it’s a gig.)
Because of those threads it makes sense to hear how well Frisell and Morgan work through “Mumbo Jumbo.” Although Motian’s drumming receives high praise in nearly every corner of the jazz world, his compositions have never received their due. Thankfully, Paul’s niece has created a beautiful two-volume songbook of his original compositions. “Mumbo Jumbo” is the most “out” track from Epistrophy, but also the most fun. Morgan’s big, wooly tone dances between the spots in Motian’s angular melody and Frisell’s exciting and unpredictable improvisations.
After recording two nights worth of music at the Vanguard, Frisell and Morgan went into Avatar Studios to mix the album along with engineer James Farber and ECM kingpin Manfred Eicher. Naturally, the mix is immaculate (a hallmark of ECM’s releases) with Frisell’s Collings I-35 sounding rich and full.
A year before the gigs that produced Small Town and Epistrophy, Frisell and Morgan played their first duo gigs ever at the Vanguard. The venue’s walls are steeped with the sound and history of jazz and it can be somewhat overwhelming to walk down into the basement and step on that stage. “It’s so heavy for me,” says Frisell. “Still I think, can this be real?” It was in the summer of 1969 when an 18-year-old Frisell first went to the Vanguard to see one of vibraphonist Gary Burton’s groups. “Over the years I’ve seen so many people there. Watching [saxophonist] Sonny Rollins at the Vanguard is one of the heaviest things I’ve ever seen,” he says.
Getting up on the stage to play was a whole ’nother story and Frisell points to the late Jim Hall for making that happen. In the early ’70s, Frisell took eight lessons with Hall, who was one of his biggest heroes. “I was just some kid and I took some lessons with Jim,” says Frisell. “I had moved back to New York and I was walking down 6th Avenue near 9th Street and there’s Jim. I couldn’t believe he remembered me.” After exchanging pleasantries, Frisell sent Hall his debut album on ECM, In Line. “About a week later Jim called and said, ‘You were taking lessons from me and now I’m taking lessons from you!’’’
The first time Hall and Frisell played a gig together was a one-off in Minneapolis, but soon after the call came for a stint at the Vanguard. “It was through Jim that I first played the Vanguard and because of that, they started to invite me to bring in my own bands. I hate to say, but back then they wouldn’t give Paul a gig.” Owner Max Gordon thought the drummer’s music was just too adventurous for the room.
Over the next few months, Frisell and Morgan will be hitting the road—not as a duo, but a trio with drummer Rudy Royston. You can head over to billfrisell.com for the full list of tour dates and to keep an eye on Frisell’s many different groups and projects.