Author: Vincent Abbate

WIB Listening Party #54: The Genius Sings The Blues

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featuring…

♫ Ray Charles, The Genius Sings The Blues

🍺 Cascade Brewing Blueberry

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

How much are you willing to pay for a can of beer?

That’s today’s musical question.

Getting deeper into craft beer these past few years has undoubtedly changed my attitude about beer. It has shifted dramatically toward quality over quantity. Big drinking parties like Oktoberfest, which is all about guzzling it down by the liter, are a total turn-off. I’ve even gone off the local brew Kölsch somewhat, an easy drinking beer eminently suitable for consumption in large quantities. Instead, I now appreciate craftsmanship and premium ingredients and savor each glass of beer or even each sip as a small-scale celebration.

That means I’m also willing to pay a little more. At the local supermarket, you can still buy a six-pack of Kölsch or Pils for around five euros. A craft beer from a specialty shop, on the other hand, can start at about two euros and cost as much as six, seven or eight euros (around eight dollars) for a single can or bottle. That’s where I start to ask myself: Can beer be that good? Is craft beer really five, ten or twenty times as enjoyable as the cheap stuff?

Recently I decided to find out. I crossed a self-imposed line and invested seven euros in a single can of beer. An exotic variety I had never seen let alone tasted before. Allow me to introduce you to Blueberry, a barrel-aged blend of sour triple and blonde ales and locally grown blueberries from Oregon’s Cascade Brewing. Cozying up to the stylish 250 ml can is today’s musical selection, The Genius Sings The Blues, a timeless Ray Charles classic.

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WIB Live: Blues Caravan 2022

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Common Ground

Blues Caravan 2022 @ Spirit of 66

Verviers, Belgium

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

From its inception in 2005 until, say, two and a half years ago, the Blues Caravan went off pretty much without a hitch. For roughly 15 years, you could count on the annual tour of Ruf Records artists for good vibes and solid entertainment. Along the way, it gave us a first glimpse of numerous artists on the rise who’ve since become staples of the international blues scene.

Then COVID happened.

The 2020 edition of the Caravan (Ryan Perry, Whitney Shay & Jeremiah Johnson) had got off to a spectacular start before having the rug roughly pulled out from under it. A new tour was planned for 2021 but never materialized due to the uncertainty of international travel and the ever-present threat of lockdown. Even the line-up that debuted early in 2022, with Ghalia Volt, Katie Henry and Will Jacobs, just barely came together; again, travel issues forced label head Thomas Ruf to reconfigure the tour several times.

Volt, Henry and Jacobs were good together. Disparate musicians to be sure – but unlike certain prior Caravan line-ups hampered by their stylistic differences, this troupe of young artists, hungry to hit the stage after the long corona layoff, put on one heck of a show. So much so that I decided to go back for more on the fall leg of the tour.

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WIB Live: Tommy Castro & The Painkillers

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A Bluesman Came To Town

Tommy Castro & The Painkillers live @ Yard Club

Cologne, Germany

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

A bluesman came to town.

I’m surely not the first concert reviewer to use that title since the album of the same name – which Tommy Castro likens to a rock opera, only it’s blues – swept away the competition at this year’s Blues Music Awards ceremony in Memphis. Local fans had waited over three years for this particular visit by Castro and his band The Painkillers. And there was more than enough cause for celebration on both sides, as this Wednesday evening club show coincided with even more accolades from the US: Readers of Blues Blast Magazine had just dubbed The Painkillers Band of the Year.

The chance to see this band on a small stage in a half-full club is something I don’t take for granted. Castro isn’t the star in Germany that he is back home. This is his third appearance at the Yard Club in the past five years. And the audience hasn’t grown. In fact, we’re still living through some kind of weird post-pandemic trauma that is depressing ticket sales most everywhere you turn.

But as they say in the local dialect: Es et wie es et. It is as it is. So my attitude as Castro and his crew launched into “You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down” at around 8 p.m. was to simply enjoy the show. To soak it all in. Wasn’t too long ago we couldn’t do this kind of thing. How quickly we forget.

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WIB Listening Party #53: Blue Guitars

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featuring…

♫ Chris Rea, Blue Guitars

🍺 Morebeer Brewing Dutch Eagle

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

If you’re a blues fan (I certainly hope so) you’ll be familiar with T-Bone Walker’s oft-covered classic “Call It Stormy Monday” and an expression it helped make famous: “The eagle flies on Friday.”

Well at today’s Listening Party, the Dutch Eagle flies. Morebeer Brewing’s Dutch Eagle Pale Ale to be exact.

And while we soar high on eagles wings, we’ll also be skimming the deep waters of Chris Rea’s 137-song, 11-CD opus Blue Guitars – an underappreciated 2005 project which can take years to listen to in its entirety.

Last time out I documented a family vacation in Berlin and my uphill battle to get a taste of that city’s beer scene. Two weeks later we arrived in Amsterdam and it was more of the same. A pair of my favorite craft brewers, Oedipus and Lowlander, are based there. I heard their clarion call. But as I surveyed our plans for the week, I didn’t see any way I could easily sneak in a visit to one of their locations without totally blowing off my wife and kids.

Fortunately, being flexible and creative can lead to unexpected discoveries. So it was that as one half of the four-headed beast I call my nuclear family headed off to “look for shoes” – what, there are no shoes where we live? – I convinced my fourteen-year-old daughter to indulge my taste for good beer. She’s old enough to understand you must throw daddy a bone every once in a while. We don’t want him going off the rails now, do we? 

A quick Google search led us to a central but well-hidden pub called Mikkeller at Morebeer. And that is where I discovered Dutch Eagle, one of the best beers I’ve tasted in a while.

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WIB Listening Party #52: Hot Tin Roof

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featuring…

♫ Los Reyes del K.O., Hot Tin Roof

🍺 Lemke 030 Berlin Pale Ale

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Berlin! More than Germany’s pre- and post-Cold War capital, this multi-faceted city of over three and a half million is also a craft beer hub. At least a dozen distinguished small and mid-sized brewers operate within the city limits and there’s an abundance of pubs and beer gardens serving local and international craft beer. As a vegetarian, I couldn’t help but notice all the street food and how far ahead of the curve Berlin is in offering meatless options. Vegan places have sprouted up everywhere. Similarly, as a beer lover, all I can say is that there, too, Berlin puts my home city and its decidedly more provincial tastes to shame.

But since my visit this summer was a family holiday, I had to make certain concessions. Much as I would have loved to hit every place on this helpful list of the 11 Best Craft Breweries in Berlin, I couldn’t, in good conscience, blow off my wife and kids and go on a six-day bender.

“Daddy, you’re a drunk!!” Nah, I didn’t fancy hearing that.

The situation, like much in life – family life in particular – called for compromise.

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WIB Listening Party #51: Sampling the Backlog

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featuring…

♫ Four songs & 🍺 Four beers

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

“I’m not gonna waste good beer.”  — Felix Unger

If you’re an Odd Couple fan – the syndicated sitcom Odd Couple, not the stage play, movie or any of its myriad other incarnations – then the line above, spoken by actor Tony Randall in the classic role reversal episode, will ring a bell. Felix (played by Randall, seen on the left in the photo below), imitating his ill-mannered roommate Oscar, puts out his cigar in a glass of wine. “I’m not gonna waste good beer” is his deadpan explanation.

I’ve adopted it as my motto for this edition of the Listening Party.

You see, while various factors (basically, a heavy workload followed by family vacations) have limited me to just a handful of blog entries in the past few months, several bottles and cans in my stash have been marching toward their expiration dates without any regard for my life situation. That beer – much of it kindly supplied to me by my craft beer partner Bierlager – is not something I want to let spoil.

The simple solution to this backlog was to divert from my usual “one album, no scotch, one beer” format. This time around, I’ll briefly present four different beers and let each one take me where it wants to take me. A song that comes to mind during each tasting will add to the fun.   

Remember: A beer is a terrible thing to waste!

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WIB Listening Party #50: If The River Was Whiskey

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featuring…

♫ Spin Doctors, If The River Was Whiskey

🍺 Welde Bourbon Barrel Bock

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

This particular Listening Party – number 50! – is going to be a music-heavy quickie. I do this whenever time gets tight. I’ve been stuck at 49 for a few weeks, burdened by my other work (yes, I do more than sit around and drink beer) and thus unable to reach that magical half-century mark. Now school is out, my kids are home and time is even tighter. It’s officially summer, some trips are planned, so the Listening Party will be on hiatus anyway.

But first – number 50.

We’ll toast this milestone with a really good and likely overlooked blues album, If The River Was Whiskey. Overlooked because Spin Doctors.

The record did peak at number five on the Billboard blues chart upon its release in 2013. Still for many, “Spin Doctors = blues” simply doesn’t equate. Doubters may think of the band as a one-hit wonder for their smash 1990s hit “Two Princes.” But years before that tune was blaring out of millions of car radios, the Doctors were indeed honing their chops at downtown Manhattan blues clubs.

While I have failed to dig up a whiskey-infused beer for the occasion (they most certainly exist), I have managed to get my hands on a bottle of Welde’s Bourbon Barrel Bock, which we’ll indulge in a bit later on. Let’s get to it …

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Book review: Murder At The Crossroads

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Book Review: Murder At The Crossroads

A blues mystery by Debra B. Schiff & Doug MacLeod

Text: Vincent Abbate

(Full disclosure: The reviewer is the author of Who Is Blues Vol. 1: Doug MacLeod – The Authorized Compact Biography.)

Let’s start with this: You needn’t be a devotee of blues musician Doug MacLeod or a blues fan at all to appreciate Murder At The Crossroads, a new novel MacLeod wrote in collaboration with author Debra B. Schiff. The book – billed on its cover as “a blues mystery” – stands on its own merits as a plainly told tale of a middle-aged man struggling with the guilt he has felt ever since witnessing a racially motivated killing as a young man in Mississippi. It’s also an unflinching portrayal of racism as it has existed at two different points in American history.

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WIB Listening Party #49: Rollin’

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featuring…

♫ Jane Lee Hooker, Rollin’

🍺 BrewLab Steel Princess

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

“Keep On Rollin’” says the official tour t-shirt.

That’s what I intend to do today. Keep things rolling with another new album and another Belgian beer. Or three.

I live just an hour east of Germany’s border with Belgium. So a quick shot and I’m in another country, where the language is different, the people are different and the beer is just as good, maybe even better. My excuse for making the jaunt this time is an appearance by Jane Lee Hooker – a steaming cauldron of blues, soul, gospel and rock’n’roll from New York City. I reviewed the band’s show at the same venue in Verviers some four years ago – you can find it here – so this time we turn to JLH’s latest and arguably best release, the aptly named Rollin’.

My first stop in the city of Verviers after arriving in the afternoon is the St Raph, a corner pub a few houses down from the concert venue Spirit of 66. Both of them are situated on the Place du Martyr, a once lively square that’s been decimated by the one-two punch of the pandemic and last summer’s catastrophic flooding. Half the stores and restaurants on and around the square are now boarded up. It’s a depressing sight.

A Val-Dieu blonde, potent and spicy, helps to lighten my spirits and reacquaints me with the local drinking customs. The chalice of foamy goodness arrives with a small bowl of roasted peanuts, and after I’ve paid and tipped the barkeeper (the bill comes with the beer), he offers me some peppered cheese cubes as well.

Actually “lighten my spirits” is an understatement. A couple of sips and I feel frickin’ great! This is the magic of beer. There, I said it. You’re in a foreign country, somewhere you don’t speak the language, it can feel intimidating. Some decent hop juice is a surefire way to put an end to that.

A short while Iater I make my way to L’Orchestre à Pots, a specialty food shop that carries a small stock of bottles from the local craft brewer, BrewLab. I walk away with a bottle each of Brass Baron and its more exotic sibling Steel Princess – the beer I’ve chosen to feature in today’s Listening Party.        

So we’re all set. The bottle is chilled. Jane Lee Hooker is in the starting gates. Let ‘er rip.

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WIB Listening Party #48: Long River

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featuring…

♫ Angelique Francis, Long River

🍺 Curtius Blonde Ale

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

In the first 47 installments of the Who Is Blues Listening Party, it’s been about my favorite records of the past. We’ve gone as far back as the 1920s and Blind Willie McTell. We’ve revisited post-war legends like Howlin’ Wolf and Albert King. We’ve sampled more recent standouts that have found their way into my collection during the past few decades. One thing I have not featured until now is a current release. And there’s a reason for that.

If your listening habits are like mine, you go through different phases. At times, you’ll be open to discovering new artists and also hungrily devour the familiar. At others, you’ll feel jaded – like there is nothing new under the sun so why even bother and if I hear another twelve-bar blues I’m gonna go nuts.

That’s kind of where I’ve been the past couple of years. I’ve tired of trying to keep up with the flood of new blues releases. I’ve all but stopped reviewing CDs for magazines. Though I’m sure I’ve missed some great records (plus lots of mediocre ones) by voluntarily cutting myself off, I simply haven’t had the mental space. I’ve needed a break. It happens.

Then some weeks ago, quite by accident, Angelique Francis – an extraordinary young singer from Ottawa – jolted me out of my ennui. Two songs into her newest record Long River, I knew I was onto something: A singular talent with a sound not quite like anyone else’s.

An exceptional talent deserves an equally distinctive beer, so as we listen to Ms. Francis, we’ll be sampling Curtius, a blonde ale from the Belgian city of Liége. It’s the flagship beverage of the curiously named microbrewery Brasserie C and comes packaged in a sleek 375 ml corked bottle.

Here’s to becoming excited about music again …

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