Author: Vincent Abbate

WoW #3 – Gary Clark Jr. – “Star”

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Gary Clark Jr. – “Star”

Everywhere you go, just know that you’re a star…

I found myself humming this on the way to work today. The perfect vibe for a Monday morning.

Gary Clark Jr. wrote “Star” while he was readying himself for the adventure of parenthood. His first son – eight months old when I spoke to Gary in Berlin two years ago – was about to splash down on Planet Earth and Gary was doing some serious soul searching. “What am I doing with my life? I gotta get my shit together. I gotta really focus and be responsible for another human being.”

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WoW #2: Rosco Gordon – “No Dark In America”

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Rosco Gordon – “No Dark In America”

No Dark In America, the final album and ultimate musical statement of Rosco Gordon’s career, emerged posthumously in 2004, two years after his passing in the summer of 2002. The title song and centerpiece of the record is an unusually upbeat tune written in the wake of the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center in New York. The tune celebrates the human spirit to an infectious, ska-inflected rhythm, exuding joy and a firm belief that any calamity, no matter how great, can be overcome.

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WIB Live: Ash Grunwald

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Puttin’ the Hammer Down

Ash Grunwald live @ topos, Leverkusen, Germany

Words: Vincent Abbate / Photos: Udo Udelhoven, Gerwin Jakobowski

There’s not much hollering and moaning in the blues anymore.

We’ve got singers, the good and the great, and not a few vocally challenged guitarists. But can anyone rattle the window panes with his voice? That’s what happened when the incomparable Son House took his otherworldly field holler indoors to the coffee houses a half-century ago. And when, even further back, Robert Johnson moaned his “Me And The Devil Blues,” well … you could practically see ol’ Satan close his claws around the doomed minstrel’s shoulder.

Ash Grunwald has got the holler down.

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WoW #1: A Contra Blues – “IDKWTBI”

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“We love the roots, but we’ve chosen to live on a branch of this wonderful tree.”

A Contra Blues – “IDKWTBI”

On “IDKWTBI” – an acronym for “I don’t know what the blues is” – Barcelona’s A Contra Blues takes on the purists. The ones who say the blues is this and the blues sure ain’t that.

“We love blues, but we have never been a ‘blues’ band,” says Jonathan Herrero of his five-piece outfit, unlikely winners of the European Blues Challenge in 2014.

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WIB interview: Watermelon Slim (Pt. 1)

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Still Fierce and Free

An Interview with Watermelon Slim

Words by Vincent Abbate / Photos by Mike Latschislaw

In an age of dime-a-dozen blues guitarists whose chief calling card is their technical proficiency, Watermelon Slim is a cherished exception. A bold, blatant personality who actually has something to say.

His success – modest as it is – owes less to effects pedals and vintage axes than to his ability to communicate universal truths. Listening to Slim, one is constantly confronted with the human struggle. For a brief, heady period roughly a decade ago, it looked as though the blues community had found – in this late-blooming Vietnam vet turned truck driver turned country bluesman – a working class hero for the long haul.

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