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Dunno. Gonna take a stab at it anyway. Because music like what's on display with Kim Wilson's Smokin' Joint is music that crosses genre and taste barriers and screams for attention. Released in mid-2001 on the M.C. Records label (www.mc-records.com) out of Huntington Station, NY, the disc has garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Blues Album and nods for several other awards as well. You should already know Wilson as the frontman and harp god for the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the band with which he tore a hole through the Austin music scene back in 1974. They're still going strong a quarter century later, but here Wilson showcases his individual talents as the central point of his first-ever full-blown solo live project. The players are stellar and absolutely driven; the guitar work is some of the finest blues picking you're going to hear anywhere. And Kim's harp, good lord, it matches his meaty vocals chord for chord from top to bottom. Waters was telling the truth. The easy way out for me on this one would be to say that Smokin' Joint is exactly that, but to do so seems a cliché and I'll try to avoid it. Instead, what we'll do here is look for a way to tell you that the intensity on this album is so bold, so deep, so inherent in every note that your heart rate won't know the difference between the ballads and the uptempo barrages of sound that your eardrums swear are distinct and separate. Perhaps "ballads" is the wrong word. My blues ignorance may be showing there. But you know what I'm talking about, don't you? Those almost Homeric odysseys through the depths of love's despair that a true bluesman will make you feel in every fiber your feeble body possesses. Those songs where the sound comes in through your ears and storms out through the big gaping hole in your soul. Where a growling bass and a single harp spawn a wall of wrenching sound that the Metallicas of the world can't equal with all their sound and fury. Those songs litter this disc like land mines. But all great blues must also find a way to exult in the pain, exonerate the struggle, shout at The Man that real humanity is still stronger and better and here for the long damned haul. And Kim lays out those songs here like a master artist, painting a picture of life both hardscrabble and profound. When the guitars start wailing, it's over. Don't bother analyzing it or comparing it; just ride the wave of cathartic emotion coming out of those axes and get lost in the vocals rising above the mix to point the way. Kim Wilson's career is already legendary; the Thunderbirds
took care of that. Now as he branches out and expands his monstrous
range, he seems to be on a quest to reinvent the term "virtuoso."
Surprisingly, and deeply rewardingly, he seems to be succeeding.
If you don't know the blues, take it from me, this is one hell
of a great place to start taking lessons. If you do know the
blues, you'll find layers and textures and rhythms here that
will keep Smokin' Joint right there at the top of your
collection's most-played list. And if you just love the music
period, this is one CD you must have. |
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How does one go about reviewing a CD from an artist who's
played with everyone from Jimmy Vaughan to Buddy Guy, from Eddy
Taylor to Big Walter Horton? An artist who Muddy Waters himself
proclaimed "the greatest harmonica player to come along
since Little Walter"? Perhaps more telling, how does one
who admittedly knows little of the deep and textured history
of blues and the cosmic way its influences can weave disparate
strands into magic write such a review?
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