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Jazz Blues Fusion by John Mayall (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Jazz Blues Fusion (Performed and Recorded Live in Boston and New York)
  • Artist name: John Mayall
  • Year: 1972
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: Polydor
  • Collection: Essex
  • Distinguishing characteristics: price label on the back ($7.99)
  • Buy it on Amazon: $319.00

Jazz Blues Fusion by John Mayall

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’m not familiar with this record, but John Mayall has come up a few times:

What I expected

I like the blues, and I like some forms of jazz, but I don’t generally have a positive view of jazz fusion.

What it was actually like

This was actually great, and I don’t think I would have considered it “jazz fusion” at all. Maybe it could be “blues fusion,” if that were a thing.

Country Road was a slow and very traditional sounding blues song, so traditional that it was hard to believe Mayall wrote it, with solid harmonica, but also a prominent electric guitar counter-melody that I loved, and I also loved that the audience was delighted by it.

Mess Around was another blues song that was also electric and with harmonica but was more upbeat, and I thought the inclusion of jazzy horns did add to it.

Good Time Boogie was much faster – like a boogie – and was actually pretty cool, with a blues style electric guitar and then also a jazz style bass guitar. I liked listening to it for a while, but it went on way too long and I didn’t care much for the saxophone solo.

Change Your Ways was much more of a jazz song, with elements that would clearly be identified as funk several years later, and even had a series of solos – first saxophone and then electric guitar, both outstanding.

Dry Throat took a different approach, going back to a slower blues song like at the beginning of the record, and then continuing with some excessively jazzy saxophone that I didn’t enjoy much.

Exercise in C Major for Harmonica had an extended bass guitar solo that wasn’t really interesting to me, and then turned into more of a jazz song like Good Time Boogie.

Got to Be This Way wasn’t dramatically different from all the other songs, but I thought it was the best because it brought together everything from the others, and with a lot of blues elements as well as a lot of jazz elements, it really sounded like a new and different style that I couldn’t quite place.

Besides that, the record’s production made a pretty hard split between front right and front left, so the stereo sounded unusually on my speakers.

Grade

5/5: love it

Hog Heaven by Elvin Bishop (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Hog Heaven
  • Artist name: Elvin Bishop
  • Year: 1978
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: Capricorn Records
  • Collection: Essex
  • Distinguishing characteristics: price sticker on the back ($3.99)
  • Buy it on Amazon: $5.01

Hog Heaven by Elvin Bishop

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’m not familiar with this record, but I am familiar with Elvin Bishop, who has come up three times in the past year and a half:

What I expected

Electric blues, rock.

What it was actually like

I was pretty excited for another Elvin Bishop record and honestly thought that I was going to love it. I didn’t.

It didn’t have a single song that I would genuinely consider to have been rock, and even its blues was limited to just one track, Midnight Creeper, which distinguished itself by being about, inter alia – heroin, cocaine, weed and quaaludes. If I had to guess which of those contributed the most to this record, it would be quaaludes[1].

Almost every song included a totally gratuitous horns section, filling my saxophone allotment for 2024 and 2025.

Could it get any worse than that? Oh, yes. Because it was 1978, there was an obligatory reggae song, True Love (with Maria Muldaur vocals that sounded like Blondie in a good way, though in 1978 Blondie was still in her disco phase and The Tide is High didn’t happen until two years later) that was pretty cringey, and the steel drums got explored even further on Waterfalls.

Oh Babe and Right Now is the Hour both had more of a jazzy big-band dance sound.

Southern Dreams was an extremely boring easy listening song with a terrible echo voice effect.

The record’s worst lyrics were on Arkansas, which led with: “Well, Mississippi’s on the east, Oklahoma’s on the west…” It was hopelessly dumb as a song, but I did think the guitar in it was good, and I will never forget Bishop’s uncanny ability to rhyme “Arkansas” with “Arkansas”[2].

Grade

2/5: bad, but I was able to listen to the whole thing

References

References
↑1 I’ve never tried quaaludes and I don’t think I’m missing out on anything, but I can assure you that if you’re using quaaludes to make music, then your music is going to be crap.
↑2 Just kidding – I’ll forget it as soon as I hit the Publish button.

Strong Persuader by Robert Cray (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Strong Persuader
  • Artist name: Robert Cray
  • Year: 1986
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: Hightone Records
  • Collection: Essex
  • Distinguishing characteristics: several price stickers on the album
  • Buy it on Amazon: $32.09

Strong Persuader by Robert Cray

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Robert Cray before.

What I expected

Jazz or blues.

What it was actually like

This was a pretty unusual record – mostly soft rock or easy listening garbage, with some jazz, except with a few solid blues songs, and almost every song had a really outstanding electric blues guitar solo.

When I think of electric blues, though, there’s a certain energy to it, and it will often sound raw and powerful, with a ton of emotion in the guitars, and nothing on this record was like that at all: it was weirdly over-produced and largely lacking in excitement of any kind.

Also, it sounded to me like the percussion came from a drum machine, though drums were credited to a David Olson.

Right Next Door (Because of Me) stood out as being easy listening crap, bizarrely juxtaposing a strong guitar solo with background music that sounded like the lobby of a dentist’s office.

The two best songs, I Wonder and New Blood, were the two most archetypally blues songs. The guitar parts on both were great, and I especially liked how the former led with its guitar solo.

Grade

2/5: weak, but I was able to listen to the whole thing

Straighten Up and Fly Right: RHYTHM & BLUES from the close of the Swing Era to the dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Straighten Up and Fly Right: RHYTHM & BLUES from the close of the Swing Era to the dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll
  • Artist name: Various, including Lionel Hampton and His Orchestra, Joe Turner, Pete Johnson, The Golden Gate Quartet, Nat “King” Cole, Oscar Moore, Johnny Miller, Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker, Wynonie “Blues” Harris, The Ravens, Tiny Bradshaw and His Orchestra, Lightin’ Hopkins, The Clovers, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, Ruth Brown, Sonny Til, The Orioles, Muddy Waters
  • Year: 1977
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: New World Records
  • Collection: Friedman
  • Buy it on Ebay: $21.07

Straighten Up and Fly Right: RHYTHM & BLUES from the close of the Swing Era to the dawn of Rock 'n' Roll

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I am familiar with a few of the artists and with a few of the songs on this compilation, but I’ve never listened to it as a whole.

What I expected

I’m not sure what to predict!

What it was actually like

This was interesting and, while I would say that it was only a rhythm and blues record in the broadest sense of the term, I guess I could summarize its position as follows: rock and roll music grew out of swing music, at least in part, and here are some examples of proto-rock sounds in swing, as well as some other examples of the swing legacy in early rock.

I wasn’t sure that the case ever really got made, but I did enjoy listening to a bunch of swing songs and asking myself if I could hear any rock in them.

In a song like Flying Home, I couldn’t, but by the time Choo Choo Ch’Boogie came around, I was able to hear it, as it definitely had a lot of swing elements, but it was clear that it anticipated a lot of rock, too. It was one of the best songs on the record.

Similarly, and maybe just over the divide, Good Rockin’ Tonight still had a lot of swing elements, but as soon as the horns stopped, it immediately sounded like a rockabilly song, very 1950s, and I thought it was also excellent. Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean and Well, Oh Well were both pretty similar to it.

There was also a lot of doo wop happening on this record, such as the a cappella song The Sun Didn’t Shine and Crying in the Chapel, both of which were fine, but not especially memorable and nowhere near as great as some of the doo wop classics of the 1950s and 60s.

And let’s not forget the blues. Hello, Central was a solid blues song, and Hoochie Coochie Man – the final song on the compilation, which may have been meant as representative of the final transition to 1950s rock and roll, was an outstanding electric blues song that I just wrote about last week when reviewing I Am the Blues by Willie Dixon (1970).

One of my favorites was Roll ‘Em, Pete, a blues and boogie boogie proto-rock song that sounded like a piano-acoustic version of Chuck Berry’s Back in the USA. I also loved the original version of Hound Dog, a rockabilly song that was slower than Presley’s later version, and it had such strong guitar for 1952!

The only song that I really did not like at all was Call it Stormy Monday, which was too slow to be effective as a swing song.

Grade

4/5: would listen again

John Barleycorn Must Die by Traffic (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: John Barleycorn Must Die
  • Group name: Traffic
  • Year: 1970
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: United Artists
  • Collection: Friedman
  • Buy it on Amazon: $22.49

John Barleycorn Must Die by Traffic

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I am unfamiliar with this Traffic record, but I previously reviewed The low spark of high-heeled boys (1971) and did not like it. I also am familiar with the John Barleycorn folk song.

What I expected

Folk.

What it was actually like

I would not say that this was a folk record at all, but I did enjoy the folk style version of John Barleycorn. It made extensive use of the flute, which made sense in the context of a traditional English folk song, and I wasn’t bothered by it at all.

I did not, however, approve of some of the instrument choices in a couple of the other songs: Glad, a jazz instrumental with strong funk and soft rock elements and a horrendous saxophone solo; and Freedom Rider, more of a rock song with harder drumming but even more saxophone and a really atrocious saxophone part.

The rock songs Empty Pages, Stranger to Himself and Every Mothers Son were all better. I enjoyed the organ solo on the first of those. The latter two were both hard rock with more electric guitar, and the second was my favorite for its guitar solo.

Grade

3/5: interesting, but not for me