John Lee Hooker And The Coast To Coast Blues Band Feat. Jim Kahr – Live+Well

By Mark Dohmann

Country:	USA
Released:	1978
Genre:	Blues
Style:	Electric Blues, Chicago Blues

John Lee Hooker is Live + Well in my living room!

Uber rides can take some amazing turns……How does one get from an Uber ride to John Lee Hooker? Sometimes you have amazing conversations in transit to and from airports. One such Uber trip allowed an interchange of music understanding between a passenger (me) and the driver (an educated African gentleman whose family had emigrated from a war-torn region of West Africa).

On 1989 “The Healer” John Lee Hooker sings:

“Blues a healer, all over the world
Blues a healer, healer
All over the world, all over the world
It healed me, it can heal you…….hmm

As I took a seat in the car the driver asked me if I wanted to pick something to play on the car stereo from his YouTube Music service on our journey. This was a nice surprise as Uber drivers occasionally offer to tune the radio to a station you might like.

For a bit of fun I thought I’d play some Derek Gripper (an amazing guitarist who a good friend and musicologist Mark Oliver introduced me to about 2 years ago). Gripper a South African creates some of Africa’s most unique musical works by fusing the country’s disparate creative traditions with styles from throughout the world. His music is inspired by European classical traditions, Malian kora works, and the ghoema/goema and vastrap music styles of Cape Town.

So what does this have to do with John Lee Hooker? Stay with me a bit longer on an Uber ride through a few hundred years of music tradition.
Gripper has a skill in synthesizing African melodies into a style of his own as a solo player.
The Uber driver was amazed I had heard Kora music and suggested I YouTube Sona Jobarteh which I found on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig91Z0-rBfo. Some of you will have heard Ry Cooder’s work with Ali Farka Toure on the album Talking Timbuktu and picked up on the bluesy feel. I played this next.

The ride finished with me playing “Crawling King Snake” from the Ornament album tracks reviewed on Live+Well.

The musical journey was about 45 minutes but it went like 5 minutes. Both of us had learnt some amazing things about musical traditions and common grounds. An audio session in a car – things you do to get a music fix!

I have been a fan of John Lee Hooker music since the landmark 1989 The Healer album which featured an amazing cast of musicians such as Carlos Santana, Van Morrison and Bonnie Raitt among others celebrating Hooker’s life and work. It is often played at shows. I have a rare box set of 45RPM Single Sided tracks of this album. Its audiophile heaven for sure.

The bard John Lee Hooker was born in Mississippi, raised up in Tennessee in 1917 (or by some accounts 2012) to Mississippi sharecroppers and passed away in his sleep at his home in Los Altos, California on June 21, 2001. He is remembered as perhaps the Greatest Blues Singer of the World.
He recorded under several noms du disque: John Lee Cooker, John Lee Booker, Texas Slim, Birmingham Sam & His Magic Guitar, Johnny Williams, Delta John and Sir John Lee Hooker. In the late ’60s, Hooker’s audience began to include white fans.

Griot traditions.

A griot (/ˈɡriːoʊ/; French: [ɡʁi.o]), jali, or jeli (djeli or djéli in French spelling) is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, or musician. The griot is a repository of oral tradition and is often seen as a leader due to his or her position as an advisor to royal personages. As a result of the former of these two functions, they are sometimes called a bard.

It is understood by musicians and historians that the blues originated in Africa. He has influenced generations of musicians from all parts of the globe. But where did he draw his musical roots from? If you listen carefully to the West African and Malian music traditions you can pick up influences.
John Lee Hooker, master bluesman and undisputed father of boogie, recorded for more than 30 labels over a span of nearly 50 years. It is reported that John Lee Hooker first heard blues on a wind-up Victrola and on radio in nearby Helena, Arkansas.

His parents were convinced that blues was the music of the devil and insisted that he practice in the barn. His stepfather, Louisiana guitarist Will Moore, was reported to have brought John Lee in contact with the “rolling, mesmeric beat” of Shreveport blues, “which had more in common with the ancestral African origins of the music than the Delta sound.”

Neil Slaven on Hooker´s Detroit debut said “John Lee Hooker … became an overnight sensation in 1949 …his talent already fully formed. Despite his recent biography, it´s likely we´ll never know how his highly individual skill developed because it´s not something he either can or wants to talk about. And why should he, since the creative process defies definition. The huge volume of music that poured through him during the first years was like a dam wall bursting, releasing the pent-up energies of a musician whose time had finally come. “

There are a bunch of albums in his discography which vary from slick studio recordings such as 1990’s “The Healer” to really rough compilations of damaged recordings from the 1940’s and 50’s and 60’s. It’s a real mixed bag in terms of audio quality. Some of his albums sound like they are bootlegs which are still worth listening to but you have to fill the gaps a little on the sonics. This can put a lot of us off the hunt as the gap can be a little hard to cross for anything but the most ardent of blues lovers.
Around 1998 I found a CD of John Lee Hooker recorded live in Cologne Germany in 1976. I thought for $3 in a second-hand bin it might be worth a try. The cover art was cheap and it looked like a low budget recording. What could I lose? Well that CD has well and truly been worn out with play. Why?

It is an amazing live recording of blues including some quiet tracks that will leave you speechless. The musicians accompanying John Lee Hooker include Jim Kahr on guitar and include some passages of John Lee calling and Jim Kahr answering guitar to guitar in a sympathetic blues man to blues man call and response of “brother I feel your pain”. If you don’t get moved by the emotion in the playing and the stunning realism – check your pulse as you might be dead!

The magical world of Discogs had not yet formed in 1998 so getting an LP of this album was a challenge to say the least. I had occasionally kept an eye out on various forums to no avail as it turns the original (German record label set up in the early ’70s by Siegfried A. Christmann) Ornament Musikproduktion GmbH was liquidated in 2011. This means that the label no longer exists.

Fast forward to 2019 and I’m relaxing over Christmas New Years period and watching a TV series with family and scouring the Discogs for LP’s I can’t afford. I recalled the catalyst of my search being that recent Uber drive and thought “what the heck I wonder if I can find a copy on LP of Hooker with Jim Kahr and his “Coast to Coast Blues Band” live album recorded in Germany during 1976.

To my surprise I found a Mint version from an Italian seller with good reviews. $180 bucks later for a 120GM pressing I thought it better not be a compressed mangled version of the CD. 3 weeks later I get the very well packaged album in Mint (yep it was well looked after) and decided to play it on the table. Would it hold up to my expectation? Would it on subsequent plays at friend’s places have the same effect?

OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tracklist

Introduction 0:50
Goin’ To California 3:41
Crawlin’ Kingsnake 5:03
You’re So Fine 3:08
It Serve Me Right To Suffer 5:14
As The Years Go Passing By 5:44
Black Night Is Falling 8:07
Can’t Stop Groovin’ 8:30