Pressure Cooker [CD]

In the last few years, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown has finally gotten what he deserves. He's become one of the best known and most honored blues musicians in the U.S.A. He's won a Grammy, cut award-winning albums for the Rounder and MCA labels, appeared on national television, been featured in major music magazines, and performed in concert halls and clubs across the U.S. and Canada. The groundbreaking, swinging hit singles he cut for Houston's Peacock label in the late 1940's and early '50's -- when his stinging guitar and wry vocals (and sometimes his flashing fiddle) were backed by brassy big bands -- have been extensively and reverently reissued. "Gate" is finally being hailed as a brilliant performer and a national musical treasure.

But a dozen years ago, Gatemouth was virtually unknown on the American blues scene. His hard-swinging, Texas guitar style was (temporarily) out of fashion. His music was just too urbane and jazzy for the younger generation of raw blues fans. Gate was living in New Mexico, seldom touring, and playing mostly with local country bands (he plays great country, too!). Like so many blues men of an earlier time, Gate (though still in his forties), was a prophet without honor in his own land.

And, like so many great black American musicians, Gate found he had won a devoted audience in Europe, where the lines between blues and jazz had never been so clearly drawn. During the '70's, he toured there often, staying sometimes for months, playing all the major outdoor festivals as well as dozens of club dates. He headlined tours that included other veterans of big-band blues, like the great Kansas City piano man Jay McShann, the pioneering jazz organist Milt Buckner, and Arnett Cobb, one of the true masters of Texas tenor sax. With all-star sidemen like these, Gate cut five albums for the French label Black and Blue. He recorded new originals and reworkings of some of his older tunes, as well as an entire album in homage to another tremendously popular star of the '40's who is just now beginning to receive his just due, Louis Jordan.

It's from those relaxed, swinging French albums that the tunes on Pressure Cooker have been chosen. This is Gate stretching out, in the company of other great veteran blues and jazz men, playing and swinging with all the fire, inventiveness and humor that now, at last, have won him long-deserved fame in his own country, too.