Dave Specter – Live at Space
13 Tracks – 77 minutes
This is Chicago based guitarist Dave Specter’s fourteenth album release on Delmark Records, a collaboration lasting over three decades. He has performed or recorded with a long list of major name blues artists including Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Lonnie Brooks, among others. Including his own albums, he has appeared on over 50 albums. He toured with Son Seals, The Legendary Blues Band, Hubert Sumlin, and Sam Lay before deciding to start his own band in 1989. He was inducted into the Chicago Blues Hall of Fame in 2018.
The album has thirteen cuts with a note that two bonus cuts, “New West Side Stroll” and “Message in Blue” are available digitally. The songs were recorded at the Evanston, Illinois Space, where Dave is a partner in the venue. He is joined on this album by Brother John Kattke on vocals and keyboards, Rodrigo Mantovani on bass, and Marty Binder on drums.
The album opens with “Rumba & Tonic” a stylish instrumental establishing Dave’s unique guitar playing amidst a rhumba beat. “Alley Walk” offers a somewhat sinister stroll. Otis Rush’s 1962 “Homework” moves the album more directly into blues with John’s organ and Dave’s guitar dialing in and adds the first vocals with Dave singing “I must be a fool wastin’ my time going to school. I can’t do my homework anymore”. “Oh baby, you got my head going around in circles”.
Dave’s guitar skirts alongside John’s piano with Dave advising that, “Nothing is going to make you happy” so just play these “Blues from the Inside Out”. On Allen Toussaint’s 1972 song “On Your Way Down”, Dave notes “it’s the same people you meet on your way up might be the same people you need on your way down”. John takes the vocal lead as he encourages to “March Through the Darkness” “until you see the light, and in our country let your voice be heard”. “Peace, love, and tolerance and know the difference between wrong and right”.
John continues lead vocals on the next two songs and establishes that “wherever I go, wherever I travel there is always something that brings me home” “Chicago Style” “is my thing” with some rousing piano from John and a long list of famous Chicago blues men. Don Nix wrote and Freddie King recorded “Same Old Blues” in 1971 with the message “morning rain keeps on falling like the tears from my eyes”. Another instrumental “The Stinger” blends guitar and organ into a catchy rhythm.
Dave returns to the lead vocals for the traditional “Deep Elem Blues” which was first recorded in 1939 and has since been recorded by many others including the Grateful Dead. The song is about a rough East Dallas, Texas neighborhood with a warning “If you go down to Deep Elem put your money in your shoes”. Sonny Boy’ Williamson’s 1937 “Bluebird Blues” follows as Dave asks the bird to “take this letter down south for me, cause I’m stuck in Chicago, and I’m just as blue as I can be”. On “Ponchatoula Way”, John on lead vocals again declares “I’m going down the Mississippi River…to see my baby, little, little lady called Susie Ray”, a rollicking upbeat number. Samuel “Magic Sam” Maghet’s instrumental “Ridin’ High” closes the album in rousing fashion with Dave’s stinging guitar accompanied by John’s organ.
This is a solid blues album perhaps with a light jazz touch in some of the instrumentals. Dave and his band are certainly steeped in the “Chicago Style”. The live recording is crystal clear and sounds like a studio recording.
