Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Keb Mo in Bloomington, MN

The occasion of the series of television films broadcast under the umbrella title
The Blues
in the fall of 2003 provided the opportunity to compile the highlights of
Keb' Mo'
's recording career thus far into a single-disc collection. One might argue that, with only four regular albums under his belt (there was also a children's album,
Big Wide Grin
),
wasn't quite ready for a best-of, but those albums attracted a wide audience among
blues
fans; each one lodged in the Top Five of Billboard's Top
Blues
Albums chart, and the second and third,
Just Like You
and
Slow Down
, won Grammys for Best Contemporary
Album. Actually, it's the self-titled first album from 1994 that is the most impressive (as well as the least "contemporary"), and six tracks from it have been excerpted here, with three from
, four from
, and one from the fourth album,
The Door
.
"Crapped Out Again"
appeared on the
Tin Cup
soundtrack
in 1996, and the final track,
"Piece of Mind,"
is a new recording. While
covers
Robert Johnson
twice here, he generally uses traditional
only as a touchstone, preferring to write his own songs in a
-influenced but essentially
pop
style, and play them in the same manner. The film series wasn't a chronological documentary in the manner of
Ken Burns
'
Jazz
, but if it were,
would have come at the end as an example of the kind of music
has evolved into, for better or worse. He is a part of the story, but, at least on the basis of this compilation, not a major figure in it as yet. (Happily, the compilation was not released at a major price. Like the other titles in the series, it was given a mid-line list price of only $11.98). ~ William Ruhlmann