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Buddy still rocks

Pioneering guitarist buddy Guy won his fifth Grammy Award recently

Seventy-year-old Buddy Guy won a Grammy Award a few weeks back for his latest album Bring 'em In and it's the right time to pay him a visit.

Back in the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton would cancel all their engagements to catch him playing live at some club or college gig, and make copious mental notes of his every move on the fret board. All that, however, never translated into recording deals. Fortunately, the entire dry decade of the 1980s ended with the comeback album Damn Right I Got The Blues, put out by the Silvertone label in 1991. It got him his first Grammy award that year. Since then a new Guy album has been hitting the shelves (and Billboard charts) with almost annual regularity, and the latest album has just won him his fifth Grammy.

Purists might decry the presence of guest artistes as far-removed as Tracy Chapman, Carlos Santana and Keith Richards appearing on this outing, or that the material strays so far into R&B/soul territory. But in my view that's a testament to Guy's stature as a musician's musician. Other guests include Robert Randolph, Anthony Hamilton and John Mayer.

The slow sentimental Bill Withers love ballad "Ain't No Sunshine" features perfect interplay between the low key vocals of Tracy Chapman and Guy's smoky world-weathered tremolo.

Guy has been recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He also owns a blues club in Chicago called Legends.

VISHWAMBHAR PATI

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