Artist: Taylor, Melvin
Label: Evidence Music Records
Release: 2002
Rating: 4.5/5
In the liner notes, Dave Rubin, editor of Guitar One, wrote: “If the blues police wrote tickets for playing too fast, Melvin Taylor would have a glove compartment stuffed with fines.” Taylor, today surely the most technically gifted blues guitarist around and the only real heir to Stevie Ray Vaughan, is a standard-bearer for a new generation of the genre. His style is fresh and energetic, and his solos are little improvisational works of art that, with a thoroughly unconventional choice of notes, go way beyond the classic pentatonic template. Guitarists would call this experimenting “playing outside the box” (where the “box” is, of course, the pentatonic scale pattern on a given part of the neck). It’s precisely because of this that the old masters have often slammed his unusual mix of Chicago blues and Benson-style jazz, seasoned with a heaping helping of sheer recklessness, forgetting that the blues, just like rock, is alive and has to keep changing.
“Rendezvous”, Melvin’s sixth album, is a wildly varied collection of covers that dips into jazz, rock, funk and, of course, blues, and its eclectic mix creates a seriously intriguing vibe. The jazzy instrumental Comin’ Home Baby, where Melvin is joined by Mato Nanji, guitarist of the Native American band Indigenous, is followed by the classic Help the poor, popularized by BB King and Robben Ford. After the title track, where the lovely interplay of vocals and Lucky Peterson’s Hammond soothes us, and a rework of the classic I’m the man down here, where Lucky picks up a guitar too and trades a few frenetic licks with Melvin, we arrive at the album’s peak. It’s marked by a tribute to delta blues legend and father of boogie John Lee Hooker, who passed away a year before the release of “Rendezvous” and recorded over a hundred albums in his long career, a feat even Zappa himself wouldn’t be ashamed of. First the laid-back Chill Out, then the fantastic The Healer, which Hook recorded as a duet with Carlos Santana in ’89 and which brought him his biggest success. Next come Sonny Boy Williamson’s Help me, Prince’s Five Women, which seems like a slightly odd pick for a blues compilation, and ZZ Top’s melancholy Blue Jean Blues, in which Melvin, in a minor key, mourns the loss of a worn-out pair of jeans. On the instrumental Eclipse, Taylor sounds just like Benson in his golden years, and on the last track, Black Queen, which he turned from Stills’s acoustic blues into an energetic stomp, his vocals already sound a lot like Vaughan’s.
Taylor, whom we recently had the chance to see in our own clubs too, has thus set out to carry on Stevie Ray’s work and reform one of America’s most celebrated institutions – the blues. He’s taken on a mighty tough job, since this is a relatively conservative genre that still rests on the sound of the forties and fifties of the last millennium and on names like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Little Walter. “How the hell am I supposed to play something that was in fashion eighty years ago, that I know absolutely nothing about,” he said in one interview. Hendrix and Vaughan brought new tools, and the blues started looking toward new horizons. You could say that music (if we’re talking about artistic expression, as opposed to pop craft, which runs on entirely different criteria) is a living organism, and it’s well known that the ones who make it into the history books are those who dare to defy established norms. And Taylor is certainly one of the rebels.
One of the few things you could pin on Melvin is the way he reaches for covers too often, which is true of his earlier albums as well, and that he’s utterly predictable in picking them. A musician of his caliber should lean mainly on his own lyrics, since without that any kind of revolution is impossible. With “Rendezvous With The Blues” he did hint at new directions, but while listening you still can’t shake the feeling that the chosen songs are just a kind of foundation and springboard for his solo excursions, which, let’s be honest, are the common thread running through everything he’s done. That’s not bad in itself, but the aggravating factor is that those excursions draw their inspiration purely from the past and from the very music he set out to move beyond, by his own account. But let’s give it time. Taylor hasn’t met Abraham yet (read: hasn’t hit fifty), which makes him still wet behind the ears for a blues master. If he makes it to Hook’s venerable age, we can expect plenty more from him.
Lineup
Melvin Taylor – vocals, guitar
Lucky Peterson – Hammond B-3, guitar
Mato Nanji – guitar
Dave Smith – bass
Steve Potts – drums
Production
John Snyder & Jerry Gordon
Track list
1. Comin’ Home Baby
2. Help The Poor
3. Rendezvous With The Blues
4. I’m The Man Down There
5. Tribute To John Lee Hooker/Chill Out/The Healer
6. Help Me
7. Five Women
8. Blue Jean Blues
9. Eclipse
10. Black Queen
