Bob's a modern boogie woogie master.
author: J.C. Burns
Bob Page's music is powerful, evocative, and sparking, a real celebration of boogie woogie at its best.
He's the classic example of an artist in it for the music, and the title of his latest, "Cash is a Problem," tells you all you need to know about a life of a workaday bluesman. "Yeah, it'd be nice to have all that fancy stuff, but this is what I do, and so cash IS a problem."
His songs are witty, contemporary, yet (as far as I can discern) completely failthful to the boogie woogie tradition.
His work is also an education for many of us who get introduced to the blues through guitar players. Listen to his driving piano sparkling above and rumbling below the other instruments--it encircles the music effortlessly, providing a drive that gives boogie woogie its great dual personality: "I've got the blues, but damned if I'm not going to celebrate it."
Bob's vocals have an authenticity that SEEM to speak to a childhood spent in delta towns, fed by southern greens, learning his chops in barrelhouses in and around New Orleans.
That's why it's all the more surprising he hails from coastal Maine! Regardless, this collection of Bob Page's music is way more Crawfish Etoufee than Boiled Lobster.
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