Triple threat Lucky Peterson makes another typically blistering statement on Double Dealin’. A killer guitarist from the piercing Stevie Ray Vaughan blues-rock school as well as a Hammond B-3 burner and impassioned singer, Peterson pulls out all the stops on the sizzling title track. He mixes his funk with a sense of streetwise humor on “It Ain’t Safe” and Andre Williams’ “3 Handed Woman” and pays direct homage to Albert King with his vicious licks on the New Orleans stroll “Smooth Sailing” and on the slow blues “When My Blood Runs Cold.” He goes to church with the B-3 on Keb’ Mo’s gospel-flavored ballad “Don’t Try to Explain,” then gets all the way down in the alley on Jon Cleary’s “Mercenary Baby.” He rocks out on the energized shuffle “Remember the Day” and offers some profound bits of wisdom on the autobiographical tale “4 Little Boys.” This one is definitely Lucky’s strongest to date, cementing his place as one of the cream of today’s blues heap.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time