THE BIG BREAK
Sometimes it’s nice to be proved wrong. This LP won’t win any awards for pathfinding blues vision or revolutionary musicianship, but it’s one of the most savory I’ve come across in a long time. It crackles with fresh, irreverent humor, and it’s mined with enough influences and obscure references to keep musicologists hitting the books for weeks. Moreover there’s a tastefulness to both the playing and singing that’s almost unheard-of in musicians this young.
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Guitarist Little Charlie Baty and his boys are another in the growing legion of Alligator Records’ Cinderella stories. The band had been gigging around the west coast for some years when, in the summer of 1986, they sent an unsolicited audition tape to the Alligator folks. They liked what they heard, and in 1987 the first Little Charlie and the Nightcats LP, All the Way Crazy, was released. Since then the band has been touring almost nonstop, taking occasional time out to revisit the Alligator studios and record. This LP is their third.
For all their irreverence, however, Little Charlie and the Nightcats are obviously well schooled. They’re not afraid to blend apparently disparate styles in ways that couldn’t be pulled off by players who didn’t know exactly what they were doing. “I Beg Your Pardon” is based primarily on the breezy blues style that developed in Texas and on the west coast after the war (T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson, et al), but Little Charlie embellishes it with a bit of Buddy Guy-style Chicago fierceness in the midst of the sweet California chording.
The band charges through a couple more standard modern-day jams: the appropriately titled “Jump Start,” a jump blues that’s primarily a Little Charlie tour de force on guitar but is nicely seasoned by Jimmy Pugh’s honky-tonk piano tinkling, and “Some Nerve,” a rather standard 80s-style high-energy blues. Then comes an unexpected delight. “Lottery” reaches further back in the blues tradition than any other number in this set. The intro seems to be based on John Lee (Sonny Boy Number One) Williamson’s 1938 “Until My Love Come Down.” It remains in a Sonny Boy groove most of the way through, Estrin’s harp conveying some of the subtle rhythmic and harmonic textures that made Williamson a seminal figure.
