THE EARL OF STRATOCASTER . . . AND OTHER MUSICAL NOTES

Somewhere—in a box in the basement, I expect—I still have the bootleg cassette tape that a friend gave me a dozen years ago or more of a Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters recording, Blues Guitar Virtuoso Live in Europe. Sometime in the meantime, I picked up that recording on CD and added it to my iPod. It has some great tunes on it: Freddie King’s “San-Ho-Zay” and “The Stumble,” the jazz anthem “Moanin’” (recorded most famously by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers) . . . and a lot of variations on Earl’s forte, the twelve-bar blues. And I’ve got more Ronnie Earl on my iPod: his albums Healing Time and and The Color of Love and his collaboration with fellow New England guitar slinger Duke Robillard, The Duke Meets the Earl. So I’ve been listening to him a lot and for quite a long time . . . but until this evening I never had a chance to see him perform live. Although he lives in the Boston area, Earl rarely “plays out” . . . and by bad luck or bad timing I’ve missed him the couple of times that he has played in the area in the past year. But the chance was well worth waiting for as he and the Broadcasters certainly did not cheat their audience at the Regent Theater in Arlington—they played for more than two hours non-stop! Mostly it was the blues . . . with variations or inflections: some slow tunes, some burners, a bit of gospel, a bit of jazz. . . . From the opening razor-edged notes on his red Fender Stratocaster, the guitarist had the audience at his mercy: he is an expressive player with a signature Strat sound—at times introspective, at times (as when he wanders off the stage and into the audience as far as his cord will allow) unabashedly extroverted—and the almost-full house lapped it up. While the missus and I agreed that a guest vocalist on a tune or two would have added some variety to this all-instrumental show, we also agreed that his keyboardist—Berklee College of Music professor Dave Limina on Hammond B3 organ and piano—certainly helped to compensate, contributing some brilliant solos as well as utterly sympathetic comping. Providing a rock-solid foundation for those two frontmen, Jim Mouradian on bass and Lorne Entress on drums rounded out the really tight quartet. (Coincidentally, Mouradian was featured in the Boston Globe a week or so ago: he and his son are master guitar makers and repairmen . . .)

Catching a legend like Ronnie Earl “live and in person” reminded me that so far 2009 has been pretty good musically. About a month ago we saw another guitar legend, Pat Martino, play at Scullers Jazz Club, and on Valentine’s night we went to see vocalist Ernestine Anderson at the Regattabar. Each of those shows had its moments, though each fell a bit flat as well. Martino has chops galore, but he plays so fast—even on slow tunes, just furious flurries of notes—that subtlety of expression tends to fall by the wayside. Martino has an interesting story: a couple of decades ago he had a brain aneurysm and lost his guitar memory—he had to relearn his instrument from scratch by listening to his own recordings. . . . Obviously, he has returned to his previous level of mastery . . . with a fury!

Ernestine Anderson has a story too: at 80 years old, she is one of the last links to the golden era of jazz vocalists (she would have come up on the heels of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday). But while she still has the pipes, she was literally invisible to many people in the audience: already diminutive, she sang sitting down on a low chair; with the Regattabar filled to overflowing, there were no sightlines to the low riser that held the chair—that was a bit disappointing. Still . . . we enjoyed being in her presence, especially since her album When the Sun Goes Down has been a constant in our lives for two decades, first on vinyl, then on CD, now on iPod . . .