Muddy Waters – At Newport 1960 – Chess/MCA 088 112 515-2

To this blogger, there is an evident weightiness experienced when attempting to communicate the significance of the musical panoramic adaptation that came about due to the efforts of the great bluesman Muddy Waters.  Without question, Waters’ blues revelations and ventures endure to inspire myriad performers, within many musical genres, and his importance in the blues realm and elsewhere cannot in any way be exaggerated.

If one is seeking a conclusive over-arching document of Waters’ substantial blues contributions, the broad compilation entitled The Chess Box (MCA CHD3-80002) is essential.  Throughout that collection, though the recording allies fluctuate and the actual societal backdrops themselves shift, Waters is the fusing link, the steady coefficient, and the very basis of what still remains the very definition of modern post-war Chicago blues.

Captured at The Newport Jazz Festival in 1960, quite simply, Waters is akin to a man possessed, as anyone who has seen film footage of the performance will attest.  He brays his blues with confident assurance, reveling in his status as the king of Chicago blues.  His energy level is high and, in something of a contrast to his immaculately conservative suit-of-clothes chosen for this performance, he sways and shakes like a man totally engrossed in the moment, which he obviously was.

His band, some of the finest in all of Chicago’s blues ranks, churns and lurches right along with him, hungrily feeding from his apparent passionate energy level.  Otis Spann is there with his always-idyllic piano foundations, as is James Cotton with his harmonica sorties, with Pat Hare lending his always-solid guitar backing to Waters’ out-front efforts, as Andrew Stephenson plies a low-end foundation on bass, and Francis Clay beats a titanic percussion framework over the whole of the outing.

The mastery of Waters’ set list cannot be overstated, nor can the sheer thrill of its delivery.  Standouts?  Well frankly, they all are.  Recent submissions at the time into the Waters catalog such as “I Got My Brand On You” and “Soon Forgotten” find great placement within better-known Waters classics like “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go.”  And the double-layered presentations of “I’ve Got My Mojo Working” and “I’ve Got My Mojo Working, Part 2” only amplify the joy of Waters and his crew on this special day thankfully caught for all of us to enjoy all these years later.

This is not only essential Muddy Waters blues, but blues itself.  It is a living, breathing document of a master and his devoted company under the influence of the blues in all the right ways.

Essential!