Provogue Records to release "Luther's Blues" - a
brand new tribute album to the great blues artist Luther Allison,
recorded by America's veteran blues rock guitarist, Walter Trout.
The album will be released in the UK on Monday 10th June on CD, Digital Download and
Double Vinyl. The album dovetail's Trout's UK tour dates from
8th May onwards.
Walter Trout's story is equal parts thriller, romance,
suspense and horror. There are musical fireworks, critical acclaim
and fists-aloft triumph, offset by wilderness years and brushes
with the jaws of narcotic oblivion. There are feted early stints as
gunslinger in bands from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers to Canned
Heat, and a solo career that's still blazing a quarter-century
later.
The veteran bluesman has seen and done it all, with just
one omission: he's never made a covers album, until now. "Luther
Allison's Blues is my first," Trout notes. "I've thought about
doing this album for years." Of all the peaks in Trout's
trajectory, his abiding memory of the late Chicago bluesman is
perhaps the most literal. It's 1986, and high above Lake Geneva, at
the palatial Alpine chalet of late Montreux Jazz Festival Svengali
Claude Nobs, lunch is being served. "So we're up at the top of the
Alps," Trout recalls, "in this big room with John Mayall, Buddy
Guy, Junior Wells, Robert Cray, Otis Rush, and as we're eating, Dr.
John is serenading us on acoustic piano. I was sat there with
Luther Allison, and we had a great talk."
"Luther was one of the all-time greats," Trout continues.
"It was just an unbelievably potent thing to watch him perform.
Just the energy and commitment that guy had, he was one of a kind.
We played together once, at the Jazz Fest that year, and just as we
walked offstage, somebody pointed a camera and we hugged and
smiled. And that photo is on the cover of the CD."When he died in
1997, the idea of the album was planted in my brain."
Walter Trout hits the UK for a series of tour dates to
promote the album:The Globe, Cardiff (May 8)
The Brook, Southampton (May 9)
Boom Boom Club, Sutton (May 10)
Wilbarston Hall, Leicester (May 11)
The Quarterhouse, Folkestone (May 12)
Tivoli Theatre, Wimbourne (Oct 30)
The Robin 2, Wolverhampton (Oct 31)
London Shepherd's Bush Empire (Nov 8)
Holmfirth Blues Spalsh, Picturedrome, Holmfirth
(Nov 9)
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Issue #69
Paul Gilbert
Out Now