John Hammond
The Office
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
On the cover of his album, Nobody But You, John Hammond poses in a dark suit and tie with a National steel-bodied guitar across his knee. The photo, sepia tinted, has been retouched to look like the sort of studio portraits record companies used in the thirties to publicise the likes of Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Willie McTell and Robert Johnson. There is an irony in Hammond’s smile but he’s entitled all the same. After nearly thirty years of performing John Hammond Jr, scion of the Vanderbilt family and son of the legendary Columbia A and R man, is as dinkum as any blues player around.
The good news is that Hammond tours here regularly- every year for the past three or four- and his recent set at the Office is absolutely up to standard. Imposingly tall, with patrician good looks and a courtly manner, he is the same age as Mick Jagger but could pass as ten years younger. And when he hooks up his harmonica and starts his familar acoustic guitar runs, the crowd is his for the duration.
Opening with a cluster of vigorous standards including Move on Up the Line, punctuated with strong harp accompaniment, Hammond then takes up the National for a sensational reading of the Sleepy John Estes classic, Drop Down Mama. This is followed by a long, languorous version of Come On In My Kitchen, hand in glove with the Robert Johnson performance but still powerfully Hammond’s own. No-one currently can capture those majestic metallic sweeps and cross rhythms as well as Hammond. It is shiver down the spine stuff. And, as if to top things further, he turns to the sweet, lyrical melancholy of Blind Willie McTell’s Mama T’aint Long ‘Fore Day- “Blues grabbed me at midnight/ Didn’t turn me loose till day…” John Hammond not only gets it right, here his choice of repertoire is unerring as well.
But not all blues lyrics are as fresh as a Delta morning. Ride Till I Die, a variation on all that chauffeur, jockey, getting-in-the-saddle sexual boasting, is less impressive, despite some dazzling fretwork and gutsy harmonica. John Hurt’s Spoonful is more to my taste,and, back to the National – Johnson’s Walking Blues and the Muddy Waters classic Sail On, cut back to the bone, the long sliding changes and bends invoking the aching piano rolls from Leroy Carr’s original.
Hammond sings selections fom his recent albums -Hello Stranger, Someday Baby (You Won’t Worry My Life No More) but it is the Mississippi motherlode which provides the showstoppers – Travelling Riverside Blues, “She got a mortgage on my body,now/ and a lien on my soul” and the Skip James hymn to occupational health and safety, Hard Time Killing Floor. We have heard this playlist from previous tours but it gets richer in the repetition. John Hammond knows this music inside out and none better than his six minute finale, a ringing version of Preaching Blues. A Johnson composition originally, Hammond takes the Son House variant, with its eerie rhythms and high desolate vocals. He amplifies its impact with each repetition- his hands flying up and down the guitar neck, pulling the heavy steel strings back into tune even as he pounds them. It is exceptional virtuosity and a reminder that guitar blues is an art form that will outlast the century that produced it. We have the extraordinary recordings of Robert Johnson and his colleagues to thank for that. But for the chance to hear this living legacy the big apple goes to John Paul Hammond as well.
The Adelaide Review, May 1995.
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Coming up at The Office this month – Deborah Conway on May 2 and,on the 26th, blues guitarist Dave Hole. Also, at Thebarton on May 27 Joe Jackson makes a welcome return and at Norwood Town Hall on May 30 , the Hilliard Ensemble, whose collaboration with Jan Garbarek on the hugely successful Officium album has brought them wide attention, will perform a range of vocal works spanning five centuries.