In looking back on 2007, it’s time to assess the releases over the last 12 months and pick out the more outstanding ones.

?Among the blues musicians of today, you’ve got your stars like Robert Cray, Jonny Lang, Shemekia Copeland and so forth, and then you’ve got the remaining 98% who are toiling away at this blessed craft in relative obscurity, anonymous to all but the patrons who catch their shows in barsRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Left-handed Chicago electric blues guitar legend Otis Rush is a living link to a Chicago blues scene ruled by the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter in the late fifties. But the harsh reality that Rush had never quite attained the status ofRead More

by Pico When it comes to jazz crooners, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Harry Connick, Jr. are the usual suspects most people think of. Do they all have to be the big, showy types, though? Do they have to have the big, swing orchestras, wear tuxedos, appear in movies andRead More

Once again, Robert Cray shows that he is reverent to the old masters – but yet wholly his own man.

It’s uncommon to find a blues recording with so much originality and verve. Willie “Sugar Bear” Kent, already memorable (as with, say, Willie Dixon) for being the rare leader who plays bass, dared take the music to a new place on this one. Featured is trumpeter and arranger Malachi Thompson,Read More

‘Truth’ finds Robben Ford record playing it safe. But he does it all so well and with such honesty that you can’t help but to enjoy it, anyway.

Guys like Tab Benoit and Kenny Neal are testament that the blues are still alive and kickin’ in South Louisiana. But when it comes to making the blues come alive in the bayou country, those guys have their match in a sixty-two year old blind white guy from Wisconsin. ThatRead More

by Nick DeRiso A truly special, even virtuoso, street-level discovery, Snooks Eaglin burst onto the musical landscape with this nearly uncatagorizable debut. The in-joke around New Orleans was that he was presented as a “folk” musician, when in actuality the then-22-year-old Eaglin had already been playing in electric blues andRead More

NICK DERISO: The Crawl, led by the memorable eyepatch-wearing lead picker Mike Morgan, improved on an already pleasant mix of precise playing and white-boy bark with this one. Singer-harmonica player Lee McBee, who wrote or co-wrote three songs, had by then found a simpler way of getting a song over:Read More