Al Basile To Deliver 'Blues In Hand' Album In October
(MPM) Eight-time Blues Music Award-nominated singer/songwriter/cornetist Al Basile announces an October 9th release date for Blues In Hand, his latest album on Sweetspot Records, with distribution by City Hall.
Blues In Hand is Al's 21st release on Sweetspot since 1998. After 2023's career retrospective B's Time, Al is back with all new songs and a new production team. Using his Duke Robillard and Roomful of Blues veteran players and recorded by Jack Gauthier in the familiar surroundings of Westlake Recording studio in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, Al had combined Jack's great tracking with the most up-to-date technology by mixer and mastering engineer Glenn Halverson at his Sonic Hill Studio outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The results are a new sound for Al's classic blues-roots songs.
"As my own producer, I've worked closely with engineers Jack Gauthier and Glenn Halverson to make Blues in Hand a leap forward in the sound of an Al Basile record. My albums have always boasted superior songwriting and performances, and now we've combined classic traditional recording techniques with a modern approach to the sound of the band. I had a long run between Through With Cool in 2022 and this one, so these are the best songs of the many I've written since that album. I also took much of the time afforded me during COVID to work on my vocals and especially my horn playing, so on this record I've featured myself much more prominently on cornet. My sound and solos are unlike any other horn player, and they fully honor the link back to Louis Armstrong, showing us a hundred years ago how a cornet can be a powerful voice in playing blues. So, this record captures the best of me as a performer as well. With guitar hero Kid Andersen again aboard along with current and former Duke's men Mark Teixeira, Brad Hallen, Bruce Bears, Doug James, and Doc Chanonhouse, the band behind me is tighter than ever and predictably brilliant and idiomatic. They really know how to showcase me at my best. With no weaknesses from inception to realization, this record jumps out at you as a celebration of modern blues, and classic Al Basile."
Al's last release, 2023's B's Time, was his critically acclaimed career retrospective that featured 17 songs from Basile's solo albums, remastered using the most up-to-date technology. Those tracks never sounded better, and many were from releases early in Al's career, before he became much better known following his Blues Awards nominations starting in 2010. And though they originated from a 25-year span, the songs sounded completely contemporary, showing that Al Basile's work is timeless, and that his output has been remarkably consistent from the beginning.
"The two biggest differences from my previous work and Blues In Hand are: 1) the songs are more personal, and mostly in my own voice, instead of my playing a lot of characters like I've often done in the past," Al Basile says about the new disc. "They reflect some things that I've gone through in the past few years that allowed me to write and sing with authority about some blues themes I haven't done before; and 2) I play more cornet on this album, with longer solos - it features me a stretching out a lot more, with the horn as my other voice. It's more of an overall statement of who I am."
"Al Basile is one of the great musical storytellers," wrote UK-based music journalist Colin Clarke in the B's Time album liner notes. "That holds whether he is working over the span of a whole album (his astonishing Last Hand and its full, 'radio/verse play' version, Last Hand 2.0), or within the confines of a single song - each of the 17 songs on this retrospective is a microcosmic magical entity in its own right. This celebration of 25 years of Basile's Sweetspot record label, and the positively protean nature of his output, is timely, even if a mere 17 songs can only provide the tip of the Basile iceberg.
"No two songs of Basile's are alike, yet all contain the stamp of his endless invention. No other writer, surely, traverses musical genres, or even whole fields of art, like Al Basile, and this retrospective is the perfect place to appreciate this unique diversity."
Blues In Hand Track Listing and Credits
All Your Lies
Blues is My Roommate
Blues After Blues
How Is It?
Good Friends
Leave It All Behind You
Ain't What You Say (It's What You Do)
Older by the Minute
Thank You, Fool
Good Rhythm
My Dearest Dream
You Ain't That Fine
When You Lose Your Money
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