335: Harpin’ on a Riff: The Best of Charlie Musselwhite, by Charlie Musselwhite

Charlie Musselwhite (USA)
Harpin’ on a Riff: The Best of Charlie Musselwhite (1999)
20 tracks, 78 minutes
Spotify playlist

Being well into blues music during my teens, I naturally listened to a lot of harmonica players, whether they were solo performers or sidemen. Little Walter, James Cotton, Sonny Terry, Junior Wells, the Sonny Boys Williamson…but it was Charlie Musselwhite that really captured my imagination and led me to pick up the harmonica for myself. Specifically, it was this album, a cheap’n’cheerful compilation that shows off some of his wildest cuts from the 1970s to the 1990s.

In presenting such a wide time-frame of Musselwhite’s music, it also shows how wide his output has been too. There are the straight-ahead blues pieces (‘Finger Lickin’ Good’, ‘Hear Me Talkin’’, ‘Taylor’s, Arkansas’, the acoustic ‘Fast Life Blues’), swaggering balls-out blues-rocks (‘It’s Getting Warm in Here’, ‘Crazy for My Baby’, ‘Harpin’ on a Riff’) and laid-back, cheesily jazzy soul (‘Revelation’, ‘Yesterdays’); there are even hints at his interest in Latin music with the track ‘Azul Para Amparo’, which he eventually explored further with a collaboration with Buena Vista Social Club’s tres player Eliades Ochoa.

While it is interesting to hear the directions that Musselwhite takes the harmonica and how he adapts his playing to the different scenarios, I actually do prefer it when he’s sticking with the most on-message blues styles. It’s in these that he gets to stretch his legs and really show off the acrobatics that he’s capable of. His playing feels so much more natural and free on those tracks – ‘Finger Lickin’ Good’ is a great example because it’s just a simple repeating 12-bar groove that he spends four minutes improvising over and holds the ear rapt with the playfulness and lyricism of his phrases.

This compilation may not be as cohesive as his albums proper – especially the two that he released on Real World Records, Sanctuary (2004) and Delta Hardware (2006), which I love – and maybe that’s why I feel that some of the pieces here are a little weak in comparison to others. Nevertheless, I include this album primarily because it shows just how well Musselwhite has expanded the range of the harmonica into previously inaccessible territories while always remaining a figurehead for the blues style of which he is a master. And, y’know, for helping me to develop a handy, pocket-sized skill that I can annoy people at parties with, too.


Tenuously-related footnote

I mention this here because I wouldn’t have an appropriate place to do so otherwise. I basically just wanted an excuse to post this video and rave about it. It’s a clip from the film Blues Brothers 2000. As a whole, that is one dire piece of cinema from start to finish, a rubbish sequel to a classic film that didn’t seem to understand where any of the original’s charm came from and instead ramping everything up to stupidly bombastic degrees that flop harder than a beer-bellied Brexiter when presented with a swimming pool at a Spanish all-inclusive resort. All except for this one five-minute scene, where that bombast comes up trumps. The set-up is that the Blues Brothers Band is taking part in a battle of the bands, and their unknown competitors, the Louisiana Gator Boys, go first. This is what happens:

The first time I watched that, my jaw was on the floor. In fact, every time I watch that, my reaction is exactly the same. That is quite probably the best blues supergroup ever to have existed. Every few bars, the camera cuts to another blues legend doing their bit. So much so that every time I watch it, I’m amazed that I forgot that so-and-so was in it. I mean, just check that line-up: B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Bo Diddley, Charlie Musselwhite (see, there was a connection!), Koko Taylor, Jack DeJohnette, Stevie Winwood, Billy Preston. Dr John popping in right at the end! Jimmy Vaughan and Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter just chilling out in the groove; Isaac Hayes as a backing vocalist! The face-melting four-way horn solo by Grover Washington Jr, Clarence Clemons, Joshua Redmond and Jon Faddis, which ends in them all improvising wildly over the top of each other in a noise from heaven itself. My word. That audience is real, by the way. A few hundred people actually got to witness that crazy performance live. If I were there, I don’t think I’d ever be able to talk about anything else.

And that’s literally it, that’s all I wanted to show you. Bloody good though innit? Now you don’t have to see the rest of the film, you’re welcome.