Jim Blair is known as the man with the slide guitar and the gravel voice, not a bad combination. For many years, either fronting bands like Hip Route or solo, he has made a name for himself delivering blues salvos and funky-grooved tunes, modern songs that echo with authenticity or perhaps the sound of the past heading into a bright new future. Now, as he gathers a new band around him, JB and the Mojo Makers, the two-track demo of which rounds out this album, he drops a new album. Ladies and gentlemen, movers and groovers…I give you Mojo Maker.
It’s been a while since the last physical drop, but as always, it’s worth the wait, especially if roots music in general, blues in particular, are your thing. “Where I’ve Been” sets the tone perfectly, guitar, voice, and beat, proving that often that’s all you need, a slow and slinky song, spacious and superb, acoustic rhythms dancing with squaling six-strings. And if the tune seems straight off the banks of the delta, his voice does conform to that classic “soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car,” sound, and I mean that in the very best of ways.
“Two Hearts on The Line” sees his voice soften, the natural catch and crack that add color and character to his bigger songs here adding fragility and vulnerability to this emotionally bruised blues ballad.
“Saved By The Blues,” in contrast, comes out all guns blazing, a tribute to the genre, full of cool lyrical references and tricolor guitars – a blend of red-hot, white-noise, and blue-sy brilliance. “Two Renegades” is perhaps the song in which he most obviously tips his hat to the genre’s formative sound, with gorgeous backing harmonies that draw a line to the spirituals that birthed it and guitar lines that ebb and flow like the Mississippi tides.
As I say, it’s been a while, but he hasn’t lost his touch, and with him doing the rounds with his new musical vehicle, you need to catch him live, not least to see how these great songs translate into a full-band show. (Spoiler alert: they’ll knock your socks off. Fact.)
