John Lee Hooker at Montreux Jazz Festival

courtesy of Play MPE

Every now and then I like to depart from my “comfort zone” of the many centuries of “serious” music and the more recent forays into adventurous jazz and devote my listening to down-and-dirty blues. My interest owes much to the time I spent in Los Angeles, during which I listened regularly to the blues programming on a radio broadcast series hosted by Bernie Pearl. Those broadcasts led to my collecting a few anthologies, following up on seeing Pearl’s own band in performance. That collection had little depth, but it still allowed me to sample the wide diversity of blues styles. As a result, one of my favorite sources has become the Rhino Records release, John Lee Hooker: The Ultimate Collection 1948–1990.

As a result of my lukewarm interest, it was only a little over two months ago that I first learned of Hooker’s appearances at the Montreux Jazz Festival, first in 1983 and again in 1990. This was shortly after the John Lee Hooker Estate and Eagle Rock Entertainment had decided to release an album of those appearances as a set of two long-playing vinyls. The only other releases are digital with separate MP3 albums for 1990 and 1983. This morning I devoted my attention to the 1983 album.

Both of these albums include extended jam sessions of “Boogie Chillen’,” which was the very first single that Hooker released. The 1983 set has the longer track, a little over seventeen minutes in duration. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a full account of Hooker’s “partners in crime” on that track. The background material for the new albums describes the performance as “an epic 13-person jam;” but it never takes the trouble to call out more than three specific names: guitarist Luther Allison, Sugar Blue on harmonica, and female vocalist Vala Cupp.

Such petty details aside, there is no shortage of imaginative innovation going into that jam session. Amazon is also offering prime video accounts of both the 1983 performance (directed by Francois Jacquenod) and the one from 1990 (directed by Claude Nobs). For now, however, my interest still lies in listening, rather than viewing, particularly since the video trailer samples “Boom Boom,” rather than the extended jam session.