Ricky Nye – Vevay Sessions
1-2-3 Records – 2023
10 tracks; 32 minutes.
Ricky Nye’s Vevay Sessions, a 2023 release, features some of the best boogie-woogie blues to come out in recent times. Nye brought together a group of musicians near his Cincinnati, Ohio base, including Jerry King on upright bass, Anthony Ray Wright on drums and guitar, and Eli Gonzalez on tenor and baritone saxophone. Nye sang vocals and played a Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano for the LP, recorded in Jerry King’s personal studio in Vevay, Indiana.
The album starts out strong with “Kay-Bee Boogie”, a high energy boogie woogie piano instrumental, showing New Orlean taste right from the start. Nye delivers an unrelenting, driving force on the keys that sounds like it could easily be in a Wild West saloon. Nye dedicated the song to his girlfriend Karen Boyhen, the illustrator of the album’s cover art.
On “You Can’t Get That Stuff No More”, a Tampa Red (a favorite of Nye) cover, loose, saucy piano mingles with tasteful notes of saxophone as Nye sings “Bootleg Sally used to live across town… They closed her down. You can’t get that stuff no more.” A jovial feeling dominates the track with a touch of seediness, blistering piano, and jolly, swinging sax solos from Gonzalez.
“She’s So Sweet” boasts a low key shuffling waltz, with Nye’s suave voice dripping with confidence, singing sweetly about his “sweet little honey that flows from the cherry tree.” His piano chops are on full display throughout. Nye selected this cover of Lonnie Johnson to pay tribute toCincinnati’s King Records.
Seedy life returns again with “Lights Out”, a song glorifying the shenanigans and fun that transpire after dark, in New Orleans tradition. Nye offers flurries of piano, while Wright gives a steady drum beat, and Gonzalez wails and wails on the saxophone, expressing ecstasy in musical form. For this tune, dancing is mandatory, as rapid notes hit one after another, in quick succession. Nye said he had long been enamored with this tune, by New Orleans R&B artist Jerry Byrne, but that this was his first time performing or recording the track.
Nye sings about domestic troubles with “Low Down Dog”, crooning “I ain’t gonna be your low down dog no more. Gonna pack my bag, down the road I go.” Soulful piano mixes with saxophone blaring out sweet. The sax comes out strong and confident, as the backbone of the song, while piano constitutes the meat. “Low Down Dog” has been a consistent sound check song that Nye wanted to record.
Lingering, jazz-like piano is featured on the Blues standard “Trouble in Mind”, a song that carries quiet confidence as Nye sings about better times to surely come ahead. Another standard, “Am I to Blame”, has meandering, slow piano as Nye sings about heartbreak. While certainly sad and reflective, the song has just a tinge of the blues.
Perhaps the most polished song on the album, “Faded Love”, comes as a slow, change of pace to the energetic boogie-woogie feature prominently elsewhere. Nye plays nostalgic, romantic, tender, and soft keys. There is a balance and cadence that allows one to catch their breath – to meditate on the space and time of the moment – in a simple and sparse instrumental that yearns without words.
Although some of the instrumental tracks are strong, the best songs on the album succeed through storytelling that dives into love, deceit, revelry, and all that makes us human. While the band succeeds in exciting covers, more original material could help Nye and his band cement their place as an authentic, original blues band capable of creation of their own.
Nye was inducted into the International Boogie Woogie Hall of Fame in 2013 and boogie is clearly where he shines. Vevay Sessions marks an excellent contribution to the boogie-woogie space, and, as as their liner notes quite rightly say, it’s “good rollickin’ fun!”
