The blues may be the most mutable-- and mutated-- form of pop music of the past 100 years, but pity the poor musician who actually tries to push its boundaries. While Eric Clapton and John Mayer reap untold fortunes toeing the middle, the most interesting variations of the blues often go marginalized as edgy niche offerings. Veer too far from tradition and you're likely to be considered separate from that tradition entirely.
To be fair, James Blood Ulmer is a bluesman only in the sense that Ulmer's onetime mentor Ornette Coleman is a bluesman. Yes, the blues is there, but such reductionism only captures part of the picture. Indeed, Ulmer's always been predisposed to Coleman's harmolodic theory of rhythmic convergence, especially as applied to jazz and funk, and though the blues isn't typically busy enough to take total advantage of Coleman's pioneering crosscurrents, Ulmer's been working overtime all the same to mesh his divergent influences.
He's been on a roll, too, embracing a brand of far from smooth blues with newfound vigor. 2001's Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions teamed Ulmer with guitarist/producer Vernon Reid (of Living Colour fame), and the chemistry was perfect; one shouldn't forget Reid cut his teeth with former Ulmer and former Coleman bandmate/fellow harmolodic traveler Ronald Shannon Jackson. With Ulmer at his best using the blues as a jumping off point for his trademark jagged solos, often delivered in tandem with Reid's distinctly less-traditional playing, 2003 saw the arrival of No Escape from the Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions, which kept the train a-rollin', as it were, summoning equal parts Hendrix and Howlin' Wolf.
2005's beautiful, haunting solo venture Birthright aside, Bad Blood in the City: The Piety Street Sessions, continues Ulmer's electric odyssey with a handful of original compositions supplementing some choice covers, simultaneously platforms for social criticism and launching pads for some colliding guitar duels.
Once again, Reid produced the album, and once again Ulmer chose a historic studio to set the mood: From Sun to Electric Lady and now to New Orleans' Piety Street. The setting is wholly appropriate, as few cities have earned to right to own the blues in the 21st century as obviously as New Orleans has. The city's rife with heartache and heartbreak, teetering in purgatory on the brink between urban revival and ghost town.
Needless to say, Ulmer's got hurricanes and floods on the mind, too, and the album begins with the Ulmer original "Survivors of the Hurricane". Coming off the spare but hardly subdued Birthright, the slamming New Orleans funk and searing electric guitar comes as something of a shock, but a welcome shock at that. This isn't the mournful blues but its angry, riled-up cousin, and the killer playing reflects that.
On Junior Kimbrough's "Sad Days, Lonely Nights", Ulmer sings like he's been gargling paint thinner, while his band (including Reid on banjo and guitar, and longtime compadre Charles Burnham on violin and mandolin) provides the perfect complements of swinging rhythm and steady pulse. "Katrina" is slightly more somber, though far from toothless, yet "Let's Talk About Jesus" (featuring singer Irene Datcher) is a more optimistic hunk of gospel-soul, a wash of wah-wah guitars, dancing percussion and Hammond organ bouncing off one another while Ulmer preaches the Christian ethic of charity that seems to have left New Orleans behind.
In terms of tribute, Ulmer hits up all the big names-- John Lee Hooker's "This Land is Nobody's Land", Willie Dixon's cynical "Dead Presidents", Howlin' Wolf's "Commit a Crime", and Son House's "Grinnin' in Your Face"-- but recontextualizes them to fit the album's theme of hard times Crescent City rebirth. "This is a burial ground, and I don't know why," Ulmer singers in the voodooed-up "This Land Is Nobody's Land", but one suspects Ulmer knows the answer. In fact, it may even have something to do with those dead presidents.
After this salvo, Ulmer may be preaching to the converted when he sings "There Is Power in the Blues", though he chooses to end the album on a more accusatory note with "Old Slave Master", which lists the Katrina aftermath as just the latest in the long line of wrongs that have trapped millions of Americans in seemingly unchangeable circumstances. It's an astute and natural way to underscore the blues as a living thing, not just the sum of its traditions, still mutating and moving forward to encompass whatever it encounters. From the sound of things, we shouldn't count Ulmer as one of the trapped.
