There is a school of thought that blues and roots music should be presented in a pure and unadulterated fashion with emphasis on the melody, storyline, and emotional platform. In keeping with that philosophy D.C music scene veterans J.P. Reali and Jim Larson reconnected in the spring of 2024 after twenty-someodd years apart to complete a selection of songs Reali had been working on since the beginning of the pandemic resulting in the new opus, Blues Since Birth. The collection of eight new songs and a heartfelt cover of a deep cut from the Dylan catalog shows off the cross section of influences the pair still share since launching the psychedelic blues jam band, The Next Step, in the 1980s.
Reali, a sought-after instructor, plays all the guitars as well as vocals and harmonica, (bass, piano and banjo on “Eileen Left”) on the album, while Larson took up the role again for drums and percussion, co-producing and engineering the sessions with Reali at their perspective home studios. Something aspiring indie musicians could only dream of 40 years ago.
The set opens with John Lee Hooker meets Booker T mash up boogie “The Devil’s Take,” a poetic addendum to the crossroads mythos with a clever twist. Like so many other artists Reali felt the heavy frustration of the pandemic and channeled it into his music and composed his personal testimony “The Virus Blues.” Reali adds energy to his guitar driven cover of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh,
It Takes A Train To Cry,” that features tasty slide work and the patented Grateful
Dead aesthetic. The tale of domestic bliss set to a country blues, “Drunk And In The Way,” may certainly have also been inspired by the hard days of covid isolation.
It is easy to pick out flavors of Albert King and Santana on the slow burning “Blues In A Minefield,” and easy shuffle “The Bad Dog Blues” kicks off with a sly tribute to Magic Sam. Country two step, “Eileen Left,” takes a page out of the Dylan and Guthrie songbook that begins as the tale of wayward lady love and ends with a socio-political twist. Railroads have long been songwriting source material with their insistent rhythm and romantic notions of traveling to distant places. Reali adds to the lexicon with his own emotive tome “Cold Steel Blues.”
The album closes with the autobiographical title track “Blues Since Birth,” a Delta Blues stomp that lays out J.P.’s heritage and his call to play the blues from an early age.Rick J Bowen
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