PHANTOM BLUES BAND "FOOTPRINTS" Source: Rock n’ Reel Date: 03/2009 Writer: David Innes

When in-demand session players and road-hardened journeymen step from the shadows and put their names to their own releases, this has been known to disappoint. Shorn of a talisman, it is often obvious why some backing musicians earn their corn as accompanists.

Happily, this is not the case with Footprints, the second release from the nucleus of Taj Mahal’s touring band, WC Handy award winners in 2001. This is an album brimful of classy grown-up blues and soul, Stax-influenced horns and precise yet warm road-honed playing.

Footprints mixes original material with well-chosen covers and, released from the day job, the Phantoms sound like they’re having a ball. There’s great good humour evident on their versions of Rufus Thomas’s ‘Fried Chicken’ and Lonnie Russ’s ‘My Wife Can’t Cook’, although ‘Barnyard Blues’ and opening track ‘Look at Granny Run’ prove that the Phantoms can cook.

Impressive, too, is the late night torch blues of the languid Conley/Robinson standard, ‘Cottage For Sale’, where Mike Finnigan’s vocal and Joe Sublett’s sax wrap lazily around the song making it their own – hard evidence that not all session players are soulless automatons playing their trade for free.