Refined, yet deliciously groovy, 72-year-old Johnnie Bassett’s music — and his bearing — belies his family’s rascally bootlegger roots.
It’s perhaps no surprise, though, that many of the more well-known Florida-area bluesmen of the Prohibition era — Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red — would stop by to sample the product. A young Bassett got to know them while they boozed, and eventually folded their unique idiosyncrasies into his own sound.
Each is part of the larger tapestry of “The Gentleman is Back,” set for release on June 30 by Slydog Records. Bassett moves with grit and aplomb — in a manner befitting both the album cover and the man’s long-held nickname — from Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” to the high-stepping “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby,” from the R&B groove of “A Woman’s Got Ways” and the lightly salacious “Nice Guys Finish Last” to the album-closing, long-form jazz-influenced “My Old Flame.”
How Johnnie Bassett never found a wider audience, we’ll never know.
His was certainly a career that started well. After a move to Michigan, Bassett got his first guitar, formed a well-regarded band and got some work in the mid-1950s as the house band at Detroit’s Fortune Records, the largest local indie at the time. He gigged with John Lee Hooker, Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner and others, and played on the Chess Records single “Got a Job” by the Miracles.
Soon, however, that tune became a sad new reality. Though he’d eventually craft the five-time W.C. Handy Award-nominated “Cadillac Blues,” Bassett never enjoyed the same blockbuster successes of, say, Robert Cray, Z.Z. Hill or B.B. King — with whom Bassett shares an inviting elder-statesmanly demeanor. Bassett was eventually forced to find work in a variety of every-day professions — dispatching cabs, working at the local auto plant.
But Bassett never stopped playing — and he became a favorite, if largely unknown local delicacy. Beloved around town, where he earned a lifetime achievement award from the Detroit Blues Society in 1994, he was without a record label deal.
All of that changed when Gretchen Carhartt wandered into the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe, in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, during a recent four-night stand by Bassett. Carhartt, after hearing a rendering of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia” rich with raw emotion, signed him right then.
The result is the superlative “Gentleman,” which features Bassett’s current working group the Brothers Groove (including keyboardist and producer Chris Codish); the tough Motor City Horns (rousingly featured on “Keep Your Hands off My Baby”); a notable turn on pedal steel by James Morris on the soulful lament “I Can’t See What I Saw In You”; and Hammond whiz Duncan McMillan — who wrote “I’m Lost.” “Your Real Gitchieegumee” was composed by jazz drummer Leonard King; Codish and his father Robert penned much of the rest of this record.
Together, they underscore Bassett’s ageless marriage of old-time jump blues, jazz guitar in the style of fellow Detroit product Kenny Burrell, and cotton-picking Delta picking.
Elegant yet earthy, with none of the out-sized trickery found on so many blues guitarist’s records, “Gentleman” is the career-defining effort that this throwback grandfather of five has deserved for so very long.
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