James Blood Ulmer – No Escape From The Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions
James Blood Ulmer’s omnivorous music has always been steeped in the blues. This was even evident, however obliquely, back when the guitarist — maybe the most unbounded improviser since Jimi Hendrix — was ringing his skronky changes on the harmolodic funk of mentor Ornette Coleman. Odyssey, Blood’s uptown-meets-down-home wonder from 1984, exposed this pedigree further, while his middling blues-rock excursions of the ’90s rendered the connection increasingly more explicit.
Ulmer didn’t completely lay bare his blues roots on record, though, until 2001’s Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions. Despite its title, the album didn’t update the synthesis of hillbilly music and R&B patented where it was recorded; rather, it tackled the amplified, echo-drenched Delta mojo that Muddy and the Wolf were working at Chess in the 1940s and ’50s.
This session, which, like it predecessor, enlists producer Vernon Reid and Ulmer’s Memphis Blood Blues Band, took place at Hendrix’s fabled studios in New York. It evinces much of the same loose-limbed brio as the record Blood and company made at Sun. The main difference, and to salutary effect, is that Ulmer, whose declamatory vocals sound like they’re being strained through a mouthful of alluvium, takes even greater liberty with his sources.
All three of the three tracks with the febrile Queen Esther testify as much: a scuffling take on John Lee Hooker’s “You Know, I Know”, and updates of two numbers written by Jimmy Reed, “Bright Lights, Big City” and a juggy “Goin’ To New York”. Done slow-drag style (even slower than Reed’s original), the last of these is galvanized by the puckish pocket trumpet of Olu Dara and the soul-deep tap dancing of Maya Smullyan Jenkins.
Elsewhere, Ulmer and longtime cohorts Charlie Burnham (electric fiddle) and David Barnes (harmonica) reimagine Howlin’ Wolf’s “Who’s Been Talkin'” as a whispered threat, and Johnny Copeland’s “Ghetto Child” as a latter-day “House Of The Rising Sun”. Blood’s own “Are You Glad To Be In America” becomes a chilling country blues for the 21st century. Most disarming, though, is the album’s murky reinvention of the lament “Trouble In Mind”, in which tamboura, electric sitar and other “exotica” conspire to invest the blues with a fittingly global cast.