Mighty Mo Rodgers Jazz Café, London ***
Blues pianist Mighty Mo Rodgers has a simple mission: "I began writing this album because I didn't like what I was hearing," he growled into his microphone to a sadly half-empty Jazz Café. Like Taj Mahal's work with Toumani Diabate, Rodgers explores the way that blues has a common heritage, from Africa to America. Tonight, dressed in a black-and-white chequered West African cloak, Rodgers wanted to make pretty damn sure we didn't forget the legacy. After browbeating us with a few quips about the state of music today, he settled into the groove of Heaven's Got the Blues, ably supported by a brilliant group of musicians.
His passionate stance is both a style and an ideal, celebratory and educational. But he urges us - singing in his gritty, expressive voice, peering over his sunglasses at the audience - not to forget that blues arose from terrible situations.
A fixture on the blues scene of Los Angeles, Rodgers was a former sideman of T-Bone Walker, Albert Collins and Bobby Blue Bland, and his musical cornerstone has always been honky-tonk blues. Surprisingly, it took him more than 30 years to record his own album. Self-produced, arranged and recorded, his debut, Blues Is My Wailing Wall, is blues with elements of southern soul, ballads and African jazz. Old-fashioned without being polite, the album earned him a WC Handy nomination for best new blues artist and this gig was our first taste of the Rodgers experience.
He pulled no punches, laying into materialism and racism ("You want a BMW, well I'm a black male worker"), while bashing out glorious piano solos. "This song is about the disgusting syphilis experiments on black men that began in the 30s in Tuskegee, Alabama," was his introduction to the gentle and affecting Tuskegee Blues. A languid mixture of fatal longings and supernatural forces, this wonderful song was hard to forget even as the band moved on to the upbeat Took Away the Drum.
Loose studio jams were turned into even looser, cyclical grooves, but it was never sloppy. Rodgers is the leader and his band were well rehearsed enough to know when to pull back.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
