Yes, even Duke Robillard has the proverbial “lost” album. Wait, correction: Had a lost album. Because the missing has now been found: Roll with Me is the one that (almost) got away. Left on the shelf. Bypassed in all the bustle of its day (namely, the early-2000s.) Unfinished, unreleased, unheard.
No longer, though, are “Just Kiss Me” or “Built for Comfort” silently waiting and waiting and waiting to pin listeners to the wall, each using their own method of doing so. The former, Duke’s own pillowy cloud of a song, is luxuriously stacked to the max with five horns (two saxophones, two trombones, one cornet), whose brassy superpowers outnumber—but not outgun—Duke’s hyper guitar, which throws quite the violent tantrum within the opening 20 seconds. The latter is Howlin’ Wolf’s song. Yes, Robillard—the master of jumping, swinging and jazzing the blues—takes on Big Chester’s jolting, rough-and-tumble classic. Either way—immaculately blown out of your seat as opposed to a Chicago-style shakedown—you’re getting pinned. Those won’t be your last encounters with the wall, either.
Ten more tracks have also been eagerly waiting to be set loose (including three rescued from 2006’s Guitar Groove A Rama and 2014’s Calling All Blues sessions). Back then, Duke handled all the singing, before his vocal cords demanded a break, thereby ushering Chris Cote up to the microphone over the past couple of recent records. So, aside from Cote filling in missing vocals on “You Got Money” plus another, that is Robillard bawling the rest: Dropping to bended knee to pour honey into the crevices of the buttery ballad “My Plea” versus panting out Big Joe Turner’s “Boogie Woogie Country Girl” and Fats Domino’s “Are You Going My Way” in a race, both times, with Matt McCabe’s flapping piano. Of course, all of the T-Bone Walker-inspired guitar bolting like zigzag lightning through the entire 47 minutes also belongs to Duke: Ricocheting like a superball off the walls inside Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown’s aptly forewarned “Boogie Uproar,” yet slinging every lick upon lick across the slow, irked strain of “Give Me Back My Money.” And given the band’s resources, all of the above are gilded with the sound of gleaming golden brass.
Glorious horns are not absolutely everywhere, though. The skies above “Look What You’ve Done” are instead the domain of a harmonica. When Muddy unveiled the song in 1960, James Cotton did the flying. Brian Jones piloted when the Rolling Stones took a crack at it four years later. Here, Sugar Ray Norcia is the one putting his harp through aerobatics: bending notes, fluttering them, bruising them while strafing the bottom-heavy churn going on down below.
But if anyone still thinks Roll with Me—Duke’s 37th solo album since peeling off from Roomful of Blues in 1979—is a platter of cold leftovers, then “Don’t You Want to Roll With Me,” with its big-band lift, and the go-go-go! thrust of “Blue Coat Man” will gladly take turns blasting any such misconception through the wall and out the window.
Label: Stony Plain
Release Date: 8/30/24
Artist Website: dukerobillard.com
Reviewed by Dennis Rozanski
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