HEART & SOUL
Like many eccentrics, our musical free spirits sometimes create in furious bursts. This can pose problems in the recording studio. In a live performance pulsing with the moment’s heat, even occasional flashes of brilliance may be enough to carry the evening. Recorded music, though, stands alone–in a vacuum, as it were–and we tend to get impatient when the performer spends too much time noodling around, thinking about what to say next.
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Sumlin is mercurial in other ways as well. He’s a kindly man with a warm smile, but his affect often seems somehow off-center, his eyes distracted. That mixture of sincerity and confusion is reflected in his music; within a single solo, Sumlin is capable of veering wildly from inspiration to near-chaos several times. Keeping him on track throughout an entire recording session must be a daunting prospect.
Such inspiring moments, however, are scattered too lightly throughout this LP. “Chunky,” based on Lowell Fulson’s “Tramp,” starts off fine in a finger-popping funk-blues mold, but only Cotton seems to know what to do with the rhythm. He’s spent enough years fronting funk-boogie-blues bands to have learned how to lay his down-home harp style over that beat with satisfying results. But despite Sumlin’s improvisational audacity, he’s a pure traditionalist and seems uncomfortable outside the confines of straight four-four time.
After an enjoyable Cotton romp on the Little Walter harmonica war-horse “Juke,” Sumlin takes on his biggest challenge. “No Time for Me” is a slow, nightclubby blues ballad nicely supported by a melancholy eight-to-the-bar lead-in and featuring Sumlin’s voice at its most bleak. It’s a little weird–Sumlin’s attempts at pathos sometimes sound more like an adolescent whine than a grown man’s blues moan, and Cotton’s harp solo sputters a bit–but such ventures into new territory are heartening for an artist who’s often thought of as stylistically limited.
