Album review: JD SIMO TRIO – Songs From The House Of Grease

Crows Feet Records [release date: 13.01.23]

An album of cover versions is always a risk. But the concept is no stranger to JD Simo. This is the guitarist chosen by renowned Film Director, Baz Luhrman to play all the guitar parts on the soundtrack of his “Elvis” biopic in 2022.

Any artist who can “mimic’ the guitar sound and style of the legendary James Burton, Scotty Moore and Tommy Tedesco has to be a singularly special talent.

Presley grounded his early singing style in the mould of African American artists like BB King, Fats Domino and others. You can hear the very same influences in Simo’s music, in this case he has chosen relatively obscure songs, some leaning further toward jazz and blues than rock.

Worth pointing out that Simo has collaborated with contemporary artists such as Blackberry Smoke and Jack White in recent years, his music is as much part of today’s popular culture as it is the past’s.

On opener, the trio… Simo, Todd Bolden on bass, and Adam Abrashoff on drums boldly change Mississippi Fred McDowall’s ‘Mortgage on My Soul’ up a gear, pushing it along with a non stop Afro beat. It’s a treat to hear Simo’s slide guitar singing and dancing its way through this fiery, rootsy blues shuffle, shaping the musical sounds in the lyrical style of the legendary jazz trumpeter, Miles Davis.

That jazz connection continues with ‘Afro Blue’, a Mongo Santamaria cover, made famous originally by legendary jazz saxophonist, John Coltrane (a member of Miles Davis’s band for many years).

There’s plenty of soul here too, the latter being flavoured with a distinct twist of Memphis.

Simo continues to assemble an album of significant craft and design, if not of original writings, with a moving cover of Blind Alfred Reed’s ‘How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live’. Indeed. A song for today if ever there was one.

And in closing with the Hendrixian, jam like thunder of ‘Higher Plane, Pts 1 and 2′, his emphatic vocals and wailing axework easily work up the passion needed to deliver such heartfelt opinion. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

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