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Indigenous in the News Featured Artist Review
Jimmy Wolf - Deep Downtown
By Jamison Mahto
There are only a few ethno-musicologists that will recognize the role that the Native American culture plays in the origin of the blues genre. All traditional Native American music is built upon a pentatonic scale that is the base that supports all other tones involved in the creation of a music that responds well to the human condition. Any bluesman that has really studied and engaged in his craft would tell you that.
Jimmy Wolf is a Turtle clan Mohawk from upstate New York, twice nominated for best blues releases at the 1999 and 2000 Native American music awards. His resume reads like an almanac that contains the names of most of the remaining great blues masters.
First of all Jimmy plays a baritone guitar. The baritone guitar is a variation on the standard guitar, with a longer scale length that allows it to be tuned to a lower range. Baritone guitars have larger bodies than standard guitars, especially in the case of acoustic instruments, and the longer scale lengths allow the strings to be tuned lower while remaining close to or at normal tension.
I’m not certain that most would recognize the close association between our culture and the culture of the African American in the way that Jimmy Wolf does in his music. I was amazed and astounded when I heard the Pow Wow drum thumping behind a blistering blues solo. This is phenomenal. This is genius. It’s natural as I see it. It only just makes sense. This is what I live for.
Jimmy’s influences are wide and varied from several different genre and he has sidemen with him that are up to the challenge of hanging with Jimmy. Deep Downtown features the solid work of James Cloyd on bass and Lafrae Sci playing those native style pow wow grooves on the drums.
In the title track Deep Downtown we’ve got a hard rock, dance tune “deep down town give it up for the band.” Given the tone of the guitar and the rhythm of the drums there might be a little punk influence here.
The song East Mclemore refers to the address of Stax records in Memphis and is a reference to the album released by Booker T. and the MG’s that featured instrumental covers of Beatles songs and is a philosophical comment on the difference between the British invasion and the excellence of American R & B. It’s raw and edgy. The cover of the album had a picture of Booker T. and the MG’s walking across the street in the same fashion as the Beatles did on their album “Abbey Road”. A parody and social commentary of the highest order.
The song Earthshaker is a song of broken hearts and the grieving that can be involved in romance. This is one of the songs that I mentioned earlier with native drumming behind a blues guitar that is on fire. I love blues-rock guitar anyway but when I heard this I really started to get interested.
Just as I thought that I’d heard something interesting the song Groover starts out with a riff that is reminiscent of Iron Man by Black Sabbath but quickly shifts to a funk, r n b groove that elevates the listener into two very separate genre. You notice the versatility right away.
The song Full Stack Attack played with the delay on refers to a full Marshall Amplifier stack and he again references Jimi Hendrix with some solo work that sounds interestingly similar to the Hendrix work Third Stone From The Sun.
Seventh son blues, a song built around a traditional blues idiom with Jimmy’s own twist. The traditional seventh son song done Indian style. Jimmy say, “seven arrows fly, upon the seventh wind, see the sun arisin’, let the day begin.“
Killing Our Own starts with an old school Chicago blues intro hook. This song has intelligence to it. It speaks of how our various communities are involved in gang warfare that holds our communities hostage because we are involved in a turf war that ends so many young lives too soon. Our own means that we are fighting amongst each other when we still have a common enemy. “We’re killing our own day by day.”
The final track, Eddie Jones has a groove so funky its nasty and lyrically it refers to the man that invented the style. Eddie “Guitar Slim” Jones. This is the way you end a CD. You blow tribute to your predecessors, you acknowledge their influence and you pay homage to the greats that went before, that paved the way. He fades jamming. Yeah.
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