Michael Bloomfield is widely regarded as one of the greatest electric blues guitarist of all time. Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix both cite him as a major influence.

Michael was the first young white virtuoso blues guitarist to come on the scene in the 60s. He started in Chicago where he actually played with Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson (as opposed to many contemporaries who learned the idiom from recordings) before joining the Butterfield Blues band ( that included Elvin Bishop ) and taking the budding San Francisco scene by storm. Along the way, he recorded with Dylan and was essential to him going electric, and turned an entire generation of players on to the magic of the late 50s Gibson Les Pauls. He virtually invented the extended guitar solo jam ( East-West ) that has since become a part of modern music. His influence on every major guitar star from that time period cannot be overstated – yet, thanks to a relatively paltry album output and ongoing substance issues that led to his premature death in 1980, his music is largely overlooked.

But this is about to change. The evidence is everywhere – Gibson recently introduced a Bloomfield model Les Paul, there has already been one tribute album (Robben Ford) and there are several dedicated websites. Players are rediscovering his music and once again speak of his mastery in the same reverential tones that until recently were reserved for more modern players like Stevie Ray Vaughn. If ever there was a right time for a great tribute album, it is now.

And so we come to ‘Michael and Me’, the Bob Jones project. Born of a chance meeting between Bob Jones and me at a live radio performance, this is an album that just seemed meant to happen. Bob played drums on what is arguably Michael’s best album (Michael Bloomfield and Friends – Live at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West) and went on to play with him for the final ten years of his career. I am a lifelong Bloomfield aficionado who learned his first guitar licks (at 9!) from the Butterfield albums, and later wore out at least 2 copies of the Live at the Fillmore LP refining my style. The chemistry was instant – and now, 5 years later, it has resulted in an album that rings true to the Bloomfield spirit. You can hear that it was mostly recorded live with crack players (Jimi Bott, Greg Marsh, etc.) in a small private studio, yet the recording quality transcends a mere live document thanks to the painstaking care taken by the engineer. The performances benefit from both the rich cache of material culled from Bob’s touring years with Michael in the 70s, and Bob Jones’ remarkable vocals. The latter cannot be emphasized enough – this is not just another record of killer guitar jams over pedestrian backing tracks. Michael himself compared Bob to Otis Redding when he first heard him, and it is this that firmly plants Michael and Me on the same level as the very best classic blues albums.

Blues fans are legion, but you can only buy the same classic recordings slightly repackaged so many times before you burn out. Michael and Me is a return to a style of playing and recording that has been almost completely lost in the modern age of ProTools and overdubbing. It is this authenticity and traditional methodology that makes the album ‘fresh’, a great, modern recording that can compete with the originals from back in the day on their own terms. Properly promoted, Michael and Me will remind people that the style of blues that informed their earliest experiences with the genre did not end in 1958, or ’68, or even ’87. Along the way, a host of recent converts to the blues will discover the genius that was Michael Bloomfield, which was the whole point of recording the album in the first place.

Nils Rosenblad – 1/1/11