Guitar wiz Walter Trout is a blues-rocker who broke into the game with the John Mayall Blues Band before unleashing his monstrous chops as a solo artist. He strikes with a vengeance on Live Trout, a two-CD set recorded at the 2000 Tampa Bay Blues Fest with his band, The Free Radicals. Trout comes out of the chute with his wheels screeching on “I Can Tell,” then proceeds to take it up a notch on “Walkin’ in the Rain.” His reading of the slow blues “The Reason I’m Gone” is infused with high drama and hot licks, while his message on the Hendrix-inspired “Livin’ Every Day” is imbued with hope and optimism. For sheer toe-curling blues power in a Stevie Ray Vaughanish vein, there’s “Finally Gotten Over You” and for something completely different there’s a tender rendition of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” Trout and The Free Radicals are not for everyone. Blues purists will be put off by the metal bombast of “Gotta Broken Heart,” their heavy-handed version of “Serve Me Right to Suffer” and the raucous rock ‘n’ roll of “Good Enough to Eat.” Thirty years ago, Johnny Winter was reaching young audiences with this same kind of super-charged energy and dazzling licks. Trout is speaking that same electrifying language to a different generation.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
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
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro