A favorite son payps tribute to New Orleans

Reviewed March 2008

Guitarist Bryan Lee is from New Orleans, and his 2007 tribute to his town's recent travails and spirit was purely blues a la the Crescent City – which means the blues mixed up with R&B and soul and Caribbean rhythms; blues like that played by Allen Toussaint and Dr. John and the late Professor Longhair. Give pianist Bruce Katz much of the credit for the gently loping swing to this album, but Lee's incisive guitar and warmly rough-hewn vocals are responsible for most of the charm here. Lee also wrote four of the 13 songs here, and they stand up nicely alongside covers of everyone from Willie Dixon and Doc Pomus to Kim Wilson and Jimmy Witherspoon.

Review by Jim Trageser. Jim is a writer and editor living in Escondido, Calif., and was a contributor to the "Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD" (1993) and "The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues" (2005).