Slapbak Blue Light Special (1994) __FULL__

Julia and Elbio could easily have stepped in and just kept things the same at Delmark. But they clearly recognize that the music business has changed a ton and is changing every day still. There is no easy answer as far as how to proceed, but they are looking to innovate, to maintain the blues/jazz legacy of Delmark but also to keep up with the times and stay ahead of the curve. They're working eight days a week to make sure the Delmark label not only survives, but thrives. That's what it seems like to me...it's hard to get them on the phone or by email, because they're always working, posting, coming up with new campaigns and forging new partnerships...I wish them the best, especially now that I'm a Delmark artist!

Music just swirls around in my head, and as I'm writing a composition, I am often surprised where the chord changes take me. If the direction pleases me, it wins out. Guys like Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Mose Allison and Bobby Timmons blur the line between blues and jazz. I don't know how to sit in at a proper jazz gig, playing bebop, but I know that organ-trio stuff and I go out of the straight blues bounds, and people tend to call those excursions \"jazz.\" I grew up equally loving the Minutemen and Meat Puppets as well as Otis Spann and Junior Wells. So some of the Claudettes endings and energies and bridges seem to be taking on elements from that music. From rockabilly and also from the Chess and Sun studios, I always loved that slapback echo, and wondered, \"why don't they ever put that on the piano\" I tried it, and it sounded great to me, and that is part of the Claudettes sound: echo on just about all the piano, sometimes light, sometimes heavy. 1e1e36bf2d