Back in 2014, genre-free guitarist Ross Hammond made an album with another convention-defying musician, drummer Grant Calvin Weston. Blues and Daily News might be heavily inspired by an old music form — Delta Blues — but included a couple of innovations or eccentricities.
First of all, these instrumental “blues,” if you will, is really a blues ‘feeling’ but freely cross over stylistic lines. Secondly, the two musicians were never in the same room when making this record. Weston laid down drum, bass and sampling tracks, sent them across the country to Hammond, and Hammond improvised over them.
And now, Weston and Hammond did that again. Root can be considered Blues and Daily News, Redux. This time, Weston sent over only drum tracks and Hammond did the rest, with slide guitar, lap steel guitar and regular ol’ guitar. Although he was the one-time drummer for out-jazz icons like Ornette Coleman, Weston can also generate straight-up grooves like the best of them, and all kinds are on display over this set of songs; “Blue Eye” could even be called rock ‘n’ roll and “That’s My Root” is rather funky. Thanks to Hammond, these are trance grooves, too.
These recordings as before were made at home — two homes, actually — but after stay-at-home quarantines have been imposed. That makes Root one of the first albums both recorded and released in this new COVID-19 world we’ve been suddenly regulated to only a couple of weeks ago.
The results are pretty damned good, as Hammond acts as if Weston is right in the room with him making the music together. But you don’t have to rely on me to tell you that, you can stream the whole album above and if you agree with me, purchase a copy from Bandcamp.
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