Intimate Blues Night at Reckless Steamy Nights
Reckless Steamy Nights and a cool last Friday in August are something that rarely happen. Since the last Friday of August and the Long Branch Jazz & Blues Festival usually fall on the same weekend, it’s one of three months each year, the others being November and December that the Woman’s Club of Red Bank is dark. As fate would have it, this year the two did happen, and our good friend from the Philly area, Greg Gaughan, who runs Jamey’s House of Music there, mentioned he was booking this bluesman from Nepal there and had the last Friday of the month open. We decided a good way to kick off the holiday weekend was with an intimate acoustic evening of early blues by Prakash Slim. Slim has been in the country for the last eighteen months, entertaining audiences with renditions of tunes by Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt and other icons of the blues, along with some of his originals.
He has even made it to Clarksdale to play, and the title of his latest collection of tunes “8,000 Miles to the Crossroads,” references the distance between his homeland and the birth-place of the blues. The disc includes Johnny Burgin, a visitor here at Reckless not too long ago, on electric guitar and Michael Freeman on drums. It was recorded by Grammy-nominated engineer, Scott Bomar at the legendary Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis. It amazes me that some one in a culture so far removed could find and devote his life to a hundred-year-old art form that is the blues.
Sitting in a chair with a table and lamp, the props provided by John Dammacco, he played his resonator guitar both with and without a slide, delivering authentic sounding versions of songs like Johnson’s “Travelling Riverside Blues,” and “Crossroads,” but sounding like no other vocalist I’ve ever heard do them. He said it took him six months to figure out the slide on “Crossroads,” but his persistence paid off. The beauty of having him in this setting, is that it’s a listening room, as opposed to a bar, where he would be drowned out by conversation. In between songs like Barbecue Bob’s “Yo Yo Blues,” and Charley Patton’s “Moon Going Down,” he would slip in an original like “Poor Boy,” or “Kokomo Blues,” from his new CD and I doubt if many, or any in the crowd realized it. There did come a time in the second set where he played two new originals, “Blues Raga Part I & II,” where the eastern influence was noticeably incorporated into the blues style. All in All, it was an interesting departure from the mostly electric blues that we are used to hearing, and I think the audience appreciated his earnest presentation and the love of the blues that he demonstrated.
We wish him the best in his journey in the blues, especially here in the States. You can find his new CD and more about him at https://bluepointrecords.com.