JASON RICCI & NEW BLOOD "DONE WITH THE DEVIL" Source: Sonic Boomers Date: 08/2009 Writer:

Album Of The Week

Harmonica wizard Jason Ricci has a story that won’t quit. Former punk rocker, ex-crackhead, onetime jailbird, and flamboyantly-out gay, he’s something you don’t see on the blues or jam band scene every day. Clad in leather, his hair dyed a rainbow of peacock hues, he’s an instant traffic-stopper, and he makes for great copy. He’s also an immensely gifted harp mangler who effectively defines what’s possible at the limits of the 10-hole diatonic instrument. He’s only starting to achieve recognition: Though he’s been active since the ‘90s, he just received his first Blues Music Award nomination this year.

Image and chops aren’t Ricci’s problems. Focus, taste, and a sense of proportion are, judging from his new album Done With The Devil. The present set has been released by Eclecto Groove Records, an imprint of the Southern California blues label Delta Groove Records devoted to blues-based artists who play outside the confines of the genre.

Aye, there’s the rub. While there is a great deal of fine playing on Done With The Devil, the enterprise never hangs together effectively. Ricci and his band New Blood dash madly in all directions over the course of this hour-long collection. It’s a textbook case of a group desperately trying to be all things to all people, and one ends up aggravated, confused, and unsatisfied by the effort.

Make no mistake: These guys can hit it. Ricci, who cites Little Walter, Paul Butterfield, and Johnny Winter’s late sideman Pat Ramsey as his avatars, is a mind-bending soloist whose floods of sixteenth notes might lead most listeners to erroneously conclude he’s playing a big chromatic harp. He’s matched at every step by guitarist Shawn Starski, and bassist Todd Edmunds and drummer Ed Michaels lays down a perfect foundation.

Problem is, these cats aren’t sure exactly what they want to be. Their skills clearly lie somewhere outside the realm of straight blues: The by-the-numbers hip-shaker “Sweet Loving” and a lugubrious cover of the old Little Walter number “As Long As I Have You” are probably the least entertaining material here. (The title tune, a nod to Ricci’s playing days in Memphis and North Mississippi, is better.) But the rest of the album covers so much terrain that you’re never certain about where you are.

If you dropped into Done With The Devil at track number four and listened to four straight songs, you might think you were listening to some weird mix tape. “Broken Toy,” a Tom Waits-styled groaner that makes explicit reference to Ricci’s homosexuality, is followed by an almost Steely Dan-like instrumental, “Ptryptophan Pterodactyl;” a thrashing version of the Misfits’ “I Turned Into a Martian,” complete with Ramones-like “ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!” count-off; and the aforementioned Walter cover.

Ricci is also a jazz fan, so there are a couple of oddball forays into ‘60s avant-blowing here – a nine-minute cover of the John Coltrane showpiece “Afro Blue” (with a “My Favorite Things” interpolation and a quick Allman Brothers quote) and a woozy album-closing rendition of “Enlightenment” by Sun Ra (who also supplied the title cut for Ricci’s debut Rocket Number Nine).

I have no big problem with bluesmen messing with the format -- players as grizzled as John Hammond and Charlie Musselwhite have done it very effectively in the late stages of their career. But the anything-goes repertoire and the crowd-pleasing overplaying in which Ricci and New Blood indulge seem geared more to the appetites of undiscriminating jam-hungry audiences than to an honest sense of exploration.