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I started a quest to find terrific blues music and incredible musicianship when I was just a little kid. I also have a tremendous appreciation of fine musical instruments and equipment. One of my greatest joys all of my life was sharing my finds with my friends. I'm now publishing my journey. I hope that you come along!


Please email me at Info@Bmansbluesreport.com
Showing posts with label Scissormen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scissormen. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Dolly Sez Woof artist: Ted Drozdowski's Scissormen - Love & Life - New Release Review

I just received the newest release, Love & Life, by Ted Drozdowski's Scissormen and I really like it! It's raw and ragged approach with overloaded guitar distortion combination is really cool. Opening with Beggin' Jesus, a rough and tumble blues rocker, Drozdowski carries the melody vocally and rips into his guitar with strong impact. Backed by Matt Snow on drums, Marshall Dunn on bass and Paul Brown on keys this is a great opener. Letter From Hell has a Bo Diddley beat driven by Snow and complimented by Robert E McClain on bass. Drozdowski does some real nice fretboard runs but never leaves the garage sound. River is a solemn bluesy ballad with a lot of room to breathe. Drozdowski's vocals are almost trance like and he lays down a very effective guitar lead line. Very very cool! Watermelon Kid is a slow rocking boogie with an interesting story line. A hot loosely played guitar solo is cool and effective. Mighty Sam McClain takes the mic for Let's Go To Memphis giving the track a more definitive R&B/Blues feel and structure. R.L. Burnside (Sleight Return) is a really sweet track with a familiar bass groove and a chorus similar to a Steve Winwood track but with a great twist on the bridge and flaming guitar interludes. Excellent! A total rework of Muddy Waters' Can't Be Satisfied maintains the soul of the track but this thing is stripped down so far it's own mother wouldn't recognize it. With only tambourine and diddley bow, this track is way cool. Check it out! Black Lung Fever is the most straight forward delta style blues track on the release. This is a really nicely composed track reflecting on Drozdowski's own heritage. This is one of those tracks that starts off as an easy grooves and then beats you to death with impact. Excellent! Dreaming On the Road is a quiet folk tune with easy acoustic resonator accompaniment. Followed by Lived To Tell provides the contrast coming out with all guns blazing. The track quiets down for the delivery of the primary melody but when the guitar is open...IT IS OPEN. Very cool! Wrapping the release is Unwanted Man (for Weepin' Willie Robinson), with a simple blues structure. Drozdowski creates significant tension on slide behind his own vocals before laying down ragged guitar riffs. This is a really interesting release with blues roots and rough edges. The more I listen to it the more i like it. I suggest you get a copy and check it out!

  If you support live Blues acts, up and coming Blues talents and want to learn more about Blues news and Fathers of the Blues, Like ---Bman’s Blues Report--- Facebook Page! I’m looking for great talent and trying to grow the audience for your favorites band! ”LIKE”

 

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Blind Raccoon & Earwig Music Showcase & A Bunch Of Other Happenings In Memphis This Week!



 
Blind Raccoon
Blind Raccoon & Earwig Music Showcase
Friday, May 10, 2 - 8:15 p.m.
Purple Haze Night Club, Downtown Memphis, One Block South of B.B. King's on Second
Featuring
Andy Cohen, Leo Hull, Tommy McCoy, Guitar Mikey
RB Stone, Johnny Drummer & Chris James and Patrick Rynn


Blues Hall of Fame Tribute Jam
Wednesday, May 8, 10 p.m. onwards
B.B. King's on Beale, Memphis


Yellow Dog Records All Star Showcase
Thursday, May 9, 12:45 - 3:45 p.m.
B.B. King's on Beale, Memphis


VizzTone Label Group's Blues Party On Beale
Friday, May 10, 10 p.m. onwards
Rum Boogie on Beale, Memphis


Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Dolly Says Woof/Hillgrass Hillbilly/VizzTone artist: Scissormen - Walking and Talking the Blues- New Release Review


I just received the new release by Scissormen and have listened to it a number of times. In fact, I listened to it a few times yesterday, watched the DVD which comes with the recording last night, and then listened to it again a few times today. I don't know if the cd accompanies the DVD or vice verse but I'll start with the DVD. The footage on the DVD is actually a 90 minute feature directed by legendary Robert Mugge [Gospel According to Al Green, Saxaphone Colossus (starring Sonny Rollins), Deep Blues and New Orleans Musicians in Exile]. I loved Deep Blues and this movie is every bit as captivating but for different reasons. It captures singer, songwriter, guitar player Ted Drozdowski along with drummer R.L. Hulsman reconnecting with the early primitive blues and the life that still exists with it. Drozdowski went to North Mississippi after seeing Mugge's Deep Blues and visited RL Burnside, Jesse Mae Hemphill and Junior Kimbrough. These interactions had a profound affect on Drozdowski. This new film documents the life of a musician turned North Mississippi blues player on the road and it is captivating to watch. The film takes place in a number of settings including numerous "Juke Joints" across the midwest and the Rock and Roll Hall of fame talking with regular people and just capturing the essence of his journey. Drozdowski goes into guitar tunings and explains how and why certain artists sound the way they do. He plays primarily on a heavily tattoo'd (autographed) tele with a humbucker installed in the neck pickup position but also played an old ES 345. Looked like he was playing through an Epiphone Junior amp. He was getting some terrific authentic sounds. The name of the release is Big Shoes referring to Drozdowski's acknowledgement that he is following some legends.

The cd portion is also terrific. It contains 15 tracks all of them great. Both cd and DVD capture the essence of that music genre that we love so much. The slidework all has the characteristic unpolished sound of the real delta blues (sometimes with a bit of delay). Specific tributes are made to both Hemphill and Burnside and if you know their work you know that'd be happy with it. This is a hot package of video and music and I highly recommend it.

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"Big Shoes" Trailer from Robert Mugge on Vimeo.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

SCISSORMEN TO DEBUT NEW CD/DVD DISC SET, BIG SHOES



SCISSORMEN TO DEBUT NEW CD/DVD DISC SET, BIG SHOES: WALKING AND TALKING THE BLUES, MARCH 20 ON VIZZTONE RECORDS

90-MINUTE DOCUMENTARY DVD PRODUCED BY FAMED MUSIC FILMMAKER ROBERT MUGGE AND ACCOMPANYING LIVE CD PRODUCED BY SLIDE GUITAR MASTER

TED DROZDOWSKI

NASHVILLE, TN – Big Shoes: Walking and Talking the Blues, the new 90-minute documentary by famed music filmmaker Robert Mugge (http://www.robertmugge.com), and an accompanying live CD produced by slide guitar master Ted Drozdowski, will be released as a special 2-disc CD/DVD set March 20 on VizzTone Records. The film and the CD both spotlight Drozdowski's Nashville-based band Scissormen (http://scissormen.com), and as a prelude to this joint release, the band will perform a special showcase on February 2 at B.B. King's in Memphis during the International Blues Challenge competition.

Big Shoes was produced during Scissormen's tour of the Midwest in February 2010 and is part road movie, part concert film, part history lesson, and part state-of-the-genre report. The film's central performance was shot and recorded at the Key Palace Theater in Redkey, Indiana. Additional live music and interviews were captured at the Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis, Indiana; the Starr-Gennett Foundation in Richmond, Indiana; Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (where filmmaker Mugge serves as an Endowed Chair Professor); and the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland Ohio. Still more interviews were shot at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame & Museum in Cleveland. For an 18 1/2-minute preview of the movie and a look at the CD/DVD liner notes, please use this link: http://robertmugge.com/big-shoes/index.html

The movie premiered at the Starz Denver International Film Festival and was previewed at sea on the West Coast Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise. After these initial screenings, the film continued on to other prestigious festivals and was shown at various cultural institutions, including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Scissormen are led by renowned guitarist and music journalist Ted Drozdowski, and Matt Snow on drums and percussion. Both the film and the album feature original Scissormen drummer R.L. Hulsman and were made during a tour that reunited him and Drozdowski. Berklee College of Music graduate Matt Snow joined Scissormen full-time in November 2010 after the film was shot, relocating to the band’s Nashville home base to pursue his love of Mississippi grooves and to join Drozdowski in forging a shared vision of deeply rooted contemporary American music. Their latest release showcases the band’s contemporary take on Mississippi delta and hill country based blues. The late Memphis/Mississippi music icon Jim Dickinson offered this take on the band’s distinctive, tradition-steeped roots sound: “Ever wonder what would have happened if Bukka White had discovered the fuzztone? Scissormen play blues for the 21st century.”

Among the new songs debuted in the15 tracks on Big Shoes CD are the movie’s title track, which Scissormen frontman Drozdowski describes as a “blues protest number.” The tune is also a musical journey, starting with basic country blues licks and traveling to a place were the sounds of Africa, the late Junior Kimbrough and Pink Floyd are equally at home. Another new entry is “R.L. Burnside,” a true story of a night Drozdowski spent with the musical mentor who inspired him to found the band 10 years ago performed as an electric country blues. And there’s “Delta Train,” a ghost story set to a riveting Mississippi stomp. Four songs appear on the DVD that are not on the CD disc; and three songs on the CD do not appear on the DVD.

Ted Drozdowski has been on the American blues scene for 30 years. He began writing about the music in the early 1980s and received the Blues Foundation’s “Keeping the Blues Alive Award” for Journalism in 1998. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Guitar World, Musician and dozens of other publications. He has also consulted on film projects including 2000’s Martin Scorsese Presents: the Blues PBS-TV series.

All the while he was also an active musician, and along the way he developed a stunning and unique command of slide guitar playing that straddles the provinces of Elmore James and the late jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock, another of Drozdowski’s mentors. He toured and made a live album with beat poet and activist John Sinclair, and co-wrote songs with Ronnie Earl that the blues guitar virtuoso cut with Irma Thomas and Kim Wilson. More recently Drozdowski produced Peter Parcek 3’s 2010 The Mathematics of Love, which received a Blues Music Awards nomination for Best Debut Album.

“I deeply loved blues all that time,” Drozdowski says, “but I believe an artist has to bring something of their own to the table and I just couldn’t find my own voice in trying to play Chicago, Texas or the other prevalent styles. When I started traveling to north Mississippi in the early ’90s and won the friendship of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and Jessie Mae Hemphill, slowly a door started to open. As a player, R.L. eventually had to almost shove me through it, but when he did I started to grasp that this was what I was supposed to do with my life.

“What’s wild is that I made my first trip to Junior’s juke joint to hear him and R.L. — who weren’t touring much yet — after seeing Robert Mugge’s film Deep Blues, where their performances blew my mind. So now, being in Big Shoes: Walking and Talking the Blues brings me full circle. And blows my mind!”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Filmmaker Robert Mugge has...established himself as the cinema’s foremost music documentarian.” Over the past three-and-a-half decades, Mugge has made dozens of music-related films and TV series, including such acclaimed documentaries as Gospel According to Al Green, Deep Blues, Pride and Joy: The Story of Alligator Records, Hellhounds on My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson, Last of The Mississippi Jukes, Saxophone Colossus (starring Sonny Rollins), New Orleans Music in Exile, Blues Divas, Deep Sea Blues, The Kingdom of Zydeco and All Jams On Deck. Big Shoes was produced by Mugge and his partner Diana Zelman, and the film's central performance was recorded and mixed by Mugge's Ball State colleague Stan Sollars.

“As the film's title suggests, my primary goal with this film was to demonstrate how Ted simultaneously honors the past masters of blues while also seeking to extend their remarkable legacy,” says Robert Mugge in the album’s liner notes. “Like our late friend and major influence Robert Palmer - known best as the author of the extraordinary book Deep Blues and collaborator with me on the film of the same name - Ted does this both as a perceptive journalist and as a powerful performer. I believe you'll find ample evidence of both on the DVD, assuming it doesn't spontaneously combust on its way to your player. I say that because, yes, above all else, the playing of Scissormen is simply incendiary.”

Scissormen will tour extensively in support of Big Shoes: Walking and Talking the Blues.