Blues Legends - Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson Live in Europe
The parade of splendid blues on DVD continues with the 2004 release ofBlues Legends: Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson Live in Europe, a compendium of performances alone and together by the two American bluesmen from the mid-1960s. The 48-minute program, mostly recorded in Brussels before a serious bunch of black-clad hipsters, has lots in common with the excellentAmerican Folk Blues Festivalseries. It’s nicely packaged, well annotated, presented with startlingly good audio-visual quality, and, most important, chock full of great performances (including two by Slim that were recorded on theAFBFtours but unreleased until now). Pianist-singer Memphis Slim (original name: Peter Chatman) is a fine musician, certainly the more stately and clean-cut of the two; Sonny Boy Williamson, a great harmonica player and singer who was known as Aleck Ford and Rice Miller before he co-opted the name of a well-known predecessor, plays music that was more unpredictable, darker (with his pointy goatee, he even bears a resemblance to the common depiction of Satan!), and thus often more compelling–-even his three 1964 tunes backed by two Swedish musicians are top-notch. Anyway you slice it, there’s nothing whatsoever here for blues fans not to like (three songs by pianist Otis Spann and the Muddy Waters band from 1960 are added for good measure), and lots to treasure.--Sam Graham