CD Reviews

James Blood Ulmer

Bad Blood in the City: The Piety Street Sessions | Hyena

By TED DROZDOWSKI | May 8, 2007

3.0 Stars

Piety Street is the location of the New Orleans studio where over three days guitarist Ulmer and his producer Vernon Reid, of Living Coloür fame, teamed to cut this dark, turbulent, funny disc. It was also, at least for those sessions, where swampy trad blues and avant-skronk collided. This time Ulmer, the former Ornette Coleman sideman who pioneered harmolodic guitar and has more recently turned to blues, was in a brooding mood, allowing the anger, sadness, and racial dread that came with Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of the Crescent City to brew until it percolated out in the gritty “Old Slave Master” and “Survivors of the Hurricane,” which seethe with hatred of white authority and implacable loss. Ulmer’s raspy North Carolina drawl is perfect for these messages. At times, it sounds as if he were a woeful, vengeful specter with a throat full of molasses and pollen. But he and Reid leavened the gloom. And some of the jokes are sonic. The traditional progression of “Old Slave Master,” which rings like an update of Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Mr. Charley” theme, gets a six-string solo that sounds like a flatulent heifer. “Dead Presidents,” classic blues songwriter Willie Dixon’s comic take on the lure of the dollar, offers a phase-shifter guitar effect that sounds like Martian laughter. Reid also plays acoustic and electric guitars, and he sprays napalm over the Howlin’ Wolf nugget “Commit a Crime.” And through it all the rhythm section plies chugging or funky backbeats that prevent the often shadowy themes from bogging down.

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