A few days ago, I’ve received a wonderful record from The Numero Group, one of my favorite labels. It’s called Light: On The South Side and it features a 2 LP gatefold vinyl and a 132 page hard back book.
The 2 LPs are a compilation of 17 tracks of the kind of funky Chicago blues that was played in Chicago’s South Side clubs in 1975-77 and the hard back book features some incredible pictures taken by Michael L. Abramson, a white guy in that massively black neighborhood. The pictures show the crowd, not the artists, that haunted those joints back in the day. There were some incredible cats and ladies in those places. The music is captured in a ‘raw’ fashion. You could hear a hiss now and then, some background noise and other details that makes you travel back in time without living the comfort of your sofa.
While most of the selection is very good, a few tracks stand out such as Andrew Brown’s You Made Me Suffer:
Such is the power of music and pictures. Together they can create the necessary conditions to make history real and restitute a long-gone atmosphere.
