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CD Review: True Blue - Years Gone By
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What a good cracking CD this is! True Blue is a four-piece, really traditional bluegrass band of great stature. As a result of hearing them I visited their website at http://www.truebluegrass.com/home1.htm and there found many fine tributes comparing them with the best there are on the Bluegrass scene. I have to say that the comparison that occurs to me, leaping straight off the recording, is Lost Highway! Believe me, that's highest praise indeed in my book as they were, for many people who saw them in Nottingham earlier this year, the very best there's been. True Blue has the same great vocal blend, great instrumental standard and plain, old-fashioned attention-grabbing presence. They perform with the single-mike format, which just adds the icing to the cake and a great visual element to the wonderful sound. There seems to be a lot of good things coming out of California in recent years in the bluegrass vein, and what a showcase example True Blue are.
A real innovative feature on this Bluegrass CD is the video file which can be seen when it is played on a PC. Don't be misled - the CD is perfect for ordinary CD players! This is just a very juicy bonus for PC addicts. Also included on the CD are PDF (Acrobat) files of the band details and the words to the three songs of their own that are included - what more can they give us? The video clip shows them in concert at the Freight & Salvage venue in Berkeley, California, playing a couple of their tracks to an audience of very happy bunnies! Happy days… The tracks are very well laid down: Natural-sounding, good trad' stuff with some sparkling instrumentation. Quite frankly, I'm hard-pressed to single out the gems because, unlike so many of the CD's which we buy, there are simply NO tracks which I don't like and they're all excellent. All the band members are well-seasoned performers: Del Williams (lead singer, guitarist and songwriter) has a voice which encapsulates so many of the great bluegrass singers and has a taste in material to match. Ed Neff (mandolin and fiddle player) really lights my candle! Sparkling mandolin and lovely traditional fiddle. Right up my street! And as for Avram Siegel, well, he is truly a banjo player's banjo player - lovely stuff. Allison Fisher lifts the whole sound on bass and tenor vocals without making the sound different in the way that some naturally do. If you hadn't known the line up prior to hearing this you simply wouldn't know it wasn't the typical line up. Allison also contributes one of her self-penned songs, which is great. I suppose you must have twigged the lightly-vieled message here by now? Oh yes… I LIKE IT! You could buy this CD as a present for anyone with absolutely no qualms.
Info: Tel (510) 845-7310 Bookings: PO Box 2452 ,Berkeley, CA 94702. Geoff Bowers, Nottingham Write to Geoff | Website Article: Ed Neff playing with the Pine Valley Boys | Butch Waller CD Review with Ed Neff 28 Nov 2003 |
By Geoff Bowers
Right: True Blue
in the on-stage jam at Slim's Night Club, San Francisco, in the