#chessrecords

WIB Listening Party #35: Wizards From The Southside

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

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 …

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WIB Listening Party #1: The Chess Story (Volume 1)

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ The Chess Story Volume 1

🍺 Wolfscraft Frisch-Pils

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

The Chess Story Volume 1, a Chess Records anthology covering the period from 1948 to 1956, is one of the albums that did it for me. A big bang that sent the blues hurtling into my universe.

Growing up in the States, the blues was familiar to me, but no more so than it was to your average American rock’n’roll fan. That means my concept of what the blues is and where it came from or even what real blues sounded like was vague and limited. I knew of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. I’d seen B.B. King on Sanford and Son and Bo Diddley’s cameo in the George Thorogood video. I didn’t think of Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton as blues because they were all over FM radio.

Then I found this Chess sampler from 1993 in the bargain bin at a local bookstore. Those were ten Deutschmark well spent. (I’d been living in Germany for maybe two years at that point.) Some of the music I knew – Waters, Chuck Berry – but it was the guys I’d never heard before – Robert Nighthawk, Jimmy Rogers, Lowell Fulson – that made me realize just how many blues treasures were out there waiting to be discovered.

Let’s crack open a bottle of Wolfscraft Frisch-Pils and give this little record a spin…

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