"I like my Blues raw, down in the dirt, making love with it" Harmonica Shah told me during the making of this CD. "I don’t like no clean Blues, whoever like it that’s fine, but that’s not what I want to hear", he told Living Blues magazine in a December 2001 interview. So raw blues it is then. 67 minutes worth of musical molten lava featuring Harmonica Shah’s hard driving harp combined with partner Howard Glazer’s muscular yet graceful guitar work. Throw in a back to the wall rhythm section and Shah’s timeless voice pulling sly, streetworn poetry out of the Motor City night air. What you end up with is an album that both stirs up the ghosts all along Hastings Street and testifies that Detroit blues is alive and well.

Andrew Galloway

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