HowellDevine
Modern Sounds of Ancient Juju
Arhoolie 550

www.arhoolie.com
 

In 2013, HowellDevine’s delightful Jumps, Boogies & Wobbles became the first new blues album that the roots-music devotees at Chris Strachwitz’s Arhoolie Records had released in 25 years. That speaks well for the relaxed but tight northern California trio’s talent for capturing the vibes of long-ago shake-’em-down country bluesmen moving their music from the deep South to Mississippi hill country to Memphis and then up to Chicago.

Their recent 11-track Modern Sounds of Ancient Juju parallels Jumps, Boogies by opening with a Muddy Waters cover – this time “Can’t Be Satisfied,” last time “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” Toward the middle, both discs boast a hot, lengthy, jazz-tinged instrumental they’ve composed. Here on “Woogie Man,” as singer/guitarist Joshua Howell’s country harmonica notes trade off with Joe Kyle Jr.’s bass riffs backed by Pete Devine’s drums, it seems like a long-ago Little Walter/Willie Dixon jam at Chess Records on Chicago’s South Side.

Like their forebears back on Beale Street in Memphis, they sound professional while still having a good time. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising from the disc’s joviality and Maine native Devine’s washboard work that as a child, he dug Spike Jones’s washboard riffs on his grandmother’s platters. When San Francisco-born Howell sings Frank Stokes’s “Sweet to Mama” line “The blues ain’t nothin’ but a woman wants to keep her man,” is he voicing the essence of the blues? “It Won’t Be Long Now” too comes from 1920s Memphis mainstay Stokes. Closing the disc with vestiges of Sonny Terry, “Railroad Stomp” (its one live cut) is a seven-minute harp romp whose train rhythms symbolize bluesmen’s migration from a rural South to an urban North.

On Modern Sounds, the line “Rollin’ in my sweet baby’s arms” introduces, not a bluegrass standard, but a slinky blues from Howell’s pen (“with thanks to Howlin’ Wolf,” as the notes say). Covering Sonny Boy Williamson II, Howell – without sounding leering – sings of a teenaged girl who can bring life back to the dead. Similarly, this trio brings life back to long-gone generations’ music.

— Bruce Sylvester