With his mouth wrapped around a harmonica, hands snapping and clawing at fretboard and strings, and feet banging out a beat on the wooden stage, John Hammond looked every inch the traditional, multi-tasking bluesman. Eyes rolling, veins bulging, he took off at the Jazz Caf? with a Little Walter song, Just Your Fool, as if he had a whole pack of hellhounds on his trail.
At the age of 64 Hammond has become part of the blues tapestry that he set out to study when still a teenager in New York and to emulate as a fresh-faced neophyte on the Los Angeles coffee bar/club circuit 44 years ago. With his mane of silver hair he now looks like a leaner, craggier version of Bill Clinton, while his haunted howl of a voice is deeply etched with the contours of experience.
But despite the long history, Hammond is still on a learning curve. His new album, Push Comes to Shove, released this week, was produced by the Philadelphia hip hop-bluesman G Love, and features five of Hammond’s compositions. He has only recently taken up songwriting, and he announced numbers such as Eyes Behind Your Head and You Know That’s Cold with a mixture of pride and mild incredulity. They were good songs, too, more than holding their own alongside his readings of standards including Come On In My Kitchen, I Just Can’t Be Satisfied and It Hurts Me Too.
Between numbers he maintained a running commentary peppered with wry anecdotes about his encounters with blues legends such as Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and Mose Alison. But, as he pointed out, it was the songs of his old friend Tom Waits that gave Hammond the biggest-selling album of his career – Wicked Grin, released in 2001 – and, in a set full of rugged vigour, nothing kicked harder than Waits’s Get Behind the Mule.
Advertisement
John Hammond plays the Abertillery Blues Festival, Gwent (01495 350360), on Saturday