featuring…
♫ Various Artists, Wizards From The Southside
🍺 Saranac Adirondack Lager
Words & photos: Vincent Abbate
I must say I’m bummed about the way 2021 is shutting down. Fourth wave, fifth wave, whatever the experts want to call it – where I live in Germany, stricter social distancing measures are back in place, requiring vaccinated individuals to present a negative COVID test to do fun things like attend concerts or enter restaurants. So people are staying home, shows are being cancelled, businesses of all kinds are suffering. Necessary? Probably. But I can’t help feeling we’re all the poorer for it.
So please allow me – in this, the penultimate Listening Party post of the year – to vent a little and return to a much happier time and place. I need only think back a couple of weeks.
I flew to New York for Thanksgiving and there it felt almost like business as usual.
Travelling upstate, I met a beer called Saranac Adirondack Lager.
And I caught up with an old friend: Wizards From The Southside, a Chess Records compilation featuring mid-50s recordings by the likes of Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Little Walter.
Read on if you dare …
