|
Same Old Blues ... Not Really
Love it or leave it. There is no compromise, nor mixed feelings while watching the “Scissormen”: someone might leave; many others decide to stay and try to survive the overwhelming slide guitar sounds from Ted Drozdowski, sort of a mild-mannered, old fashion, American gentleman with a Mississippi heart and a psychedelic soul. Indeed, a weird, still widely un-chartered, musical combination. Looking back, it is undeniable that many heroes of the psychedelic rock were hook, sinker and nail with the Blues. Just to mention a few, Peter Green, David Gilmour and Tony McPhee on the British side, Captain Beefheart, Moving Sidewalks with a very young Billy Gibbons on the American side. However, the most prominent examples of that insane mixture between Blues and psychedelic rock came from the masters of the seventies – Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead – who gave life to sparse dusty jewels where twelve bars blues merge with the acid world. Those times are now dead and gone. The psychedelic rock regularly pops up as the new musical way, a déjà vu phenomenon which lasts some months only. Conversely, Ted Drozdowski’s Scissormen is founded on a solid and fertile ground. He’s friend with Mighty Sam McLain, Watermelon Slim and Ike Turner – a crucial figure for Scissormen together with the late R.L. Burnside, the prime instigator, Junior Kimborough, Ike Turner and Jess Mae Hemphill. At the end of the nineties, Ted was leading a group called the Devil Gods, who recorded a CD, “Sick Little Monkey” (Barking Koala, 2000), by now a psychedelic rock hard-to-find item. With friends like the above-mentioned gentlemen is hard to say no to the Blues; yet Ted wished to look for his own way, just being another Blues clone would have not suffice him. Listening to masterpiece like “Too Bad Jim”, “I wish I was in Heaven Sitting Down”, the Scissormen became a reality through the ground-breaking “Jinx Breakers” and the recent “When the devil calls”, a more intimate – tradition-like – acoustic Blues record. The common element is Ted’s terrific slide-guitar work, often matched by rock-solid drumming provided by Rob Hulsman. The Scissormen’s live shows are a hard-to-forget, lot of fun experience marked by Ted’s unstoppable jumps around the stage and his frantic slide-guitar. But do not be mistaken by the appearance: Ted Drozdowski and his Scissormen may easily be a few miles ahead and their music is an out-of-sight anticipation of the Blues next-to-come.
Luca Lupoli
|
Track List
|
