Audio 54 2024
With a pinch of gris-gris on his doorstep, Leicester-born Deutschland dweller casts dark magic across the water and into the swamp.
Papa Voodoo
If you think playing blues for six decades leaves no place for experiments in a field that doesn’t favor veering away from the form anyway, here’s an album destined to dispel such a notion and shine a different light at its mastermind’s open-mindedness. Mick Pini may have demonstrated a robust approach to his trade since the late ’80s, when he got signed to the legendary Blue Horizon label, yet the veteran never tried to reset his mojo in a fresh way until recently. After encountering a kindred spirit in his fellow countryman, producer and composer Craig Marshall, who suggested a joint venture, the guitarist blended Delta licks and dance beats and located this intoxicating gumbo in Louisiana without leaving European soil. The results of their work, a mélange of traditional music and contemporary arrangements, are quite arresting to say the least.
There are nods to Pini’s influences in “A Cold Day In Memphis” which picks up where Gary Moore’s “Story Of The Blues” left off, and in “Blues For Peter Green” – the two tracks shipped from Chicago to the South – but while the latter is an atmospheric mini-epic rooted in the windy past, the former reaches for the future, reappearing as the platter’s penultimate number under the guise of “Memphis Jazztronica” and taking ambient grooves to the fore. However, this twangy couple of cold cuts should come as a tasty contrast to the brass-abetted simmering of pieces like the wah-wah-spiced instrumental opener “Duck Soup” and the creepy titular ballad that pulses through the shimmer of Marshall’s ivories. Yet if “Funkadelikatessen” shows an infectious smile under Mick’s sinister growling and Bootsy-esque bass shenanigans, the gloomy “Mornington Crescent ’69” and effervescent “Make It Last” flash their fusion fares with a flair; and if “Spark” offers the listener a slice of bossa nova, and “Never Goes Away” bends a Hendrix riff into something more mesmeric, “Theme for Icarus” soars into rarefied air in search of a perfect elegy.
Instead, it’s “You No Betta” that wraps things up with a slice of reggae – a tad incongruously but upliftingly – and this unexpected stylistic turn is hinting at Mick Pini’s potential, and potent, next trip. Meeting him there will be a treat for sure.
****4/5
