Chances are that if you’ve been to Chicago’s popular blues club, Kingston Mines, or to a recent blues festival you’ve seen Joanna Connor perform. You also hadn’t seen many recent recordings of Connor as it has was a long drought of 14 years until she resumed recording, making a strong impact with 2016’s Six String Stories, which proved to be a launching pad for vigorous touring she hadn’t done as she took time off to raise her daughter. However, her local gigging to the frequency of 200 nights a year has served to really hone her guitar chops to the point where her improvisational style melds blues, jazz, and rock. This writer had this, her newest offering Rise in the multi-CD player following a jazz fusion album and it wasn’t exactly clear where one ended and hers began. While she built her reputation with incendiary slide playing, this album, more than any of hers, proves she is no one-trick pony, now embracing a wider array of styles.
If you haven’t so already, go to YouTube and plug in her name. You’ll see this woman in a purple dress at the North Atlantic Blues Festival deliver in less than 3 minutes some of the most scorching slide guitar you’ve ever seen. The video went viral and Connor has this to say about it, “That video has gone around the world a few times getting millions of views and being re-posted in Japan, Russia, and all over Europe. ….I think people loved the combination. Here’s a woman who looks like somebody’s mom, and she’s playing like this. What I remember most was that it was 90 degrees that day, so I was wearing the coolest dress I had.” Her slide playing on Six Strings Stories furthered enhanced that part of her guitar playing but it didn’t prepare us for this.
The scorching guitar is still present on Sly Stone’s “If you Want Me to Stay,” on the raunchy “Mutha,” and in “Flip” the rousing original that opens. Yet she goes in several directions. The title track is essentially a jazz guitar showcase, a bit like a faster tempo Wes Montgomery. She follows with a unique take on the jazz-blues ballad “Since I Fell For You” before touching on Celtic music in her ode to her dad, “My Irish Father.” Most surprisingly there’s hip-hop too but we’ll get to that later.
The usually electric guitar toting Connor takes an amazing acoustic guitar solo on “My Irish Father.” She comments, “I did the ancestry.com thing and found my birth father, it turns out he was an NBA player – That really unlocked a key for me because all the women in my family are five-foot-tow and I’m so tall. And I’ve always loved Irish traditional music, so maybe I have a kindred thing for it. So, in some ways, it’s been a heavy few years.”
The presence of a new band certainly plays into her newfound inspiration. Two drummers split duties – Cameron Lewis and Tyrone “Ty Drums” Mitchell. Joewaun Jay Red Scott is the bassist with Delby Littlejohn on keys. Connor says, “The whole record is me and a bunch of younger men. So there was some kind of power coming through them to me. Guests include Mike Zito with a lead guitar break on “Bad Hand” and prominently rapper Alphonso BuggZ Dinero, who was introduced to her by her DJ son. You hear his rap on the opening “Flip,” background vocal on “Cherish and Worship You” with spoken word on “Mutha” and the standout closing track “Dear America.” Connor’s first overtly political piece since 2002. She claims that it began as a rewrite of “When the Levee Breaks’ and then took its own course to address our current divided state with BuggZ’s lyrics that claims are words that needed to be said in these troubling times.
Excepting the Buddy Johnson and Sly Stone covers, Connor either wrote or co-wrote all tracks. It may not seem cohesive but focus on her amazingly versatile guitar that shows both her trademark string-bending, mind-blowing fury, as well as a sensitive side and deft jazz-like touch. The legions of blues purists that have come to adore her slide playing and Chicago blues style may be taken aback but Connor more than “rises” to these new challenges. She basks in them, indicating that more surprises are forthcoming.
One Response
Thanks Doug for this thoughtful review!