![\"\"](\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/butterfield_east_west.jpg\")
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Some people — musicians, listeners, you name it — get their nose out of joint when writers apply labels to music. How dare we, the thinking goes. The music shouldn\u2019t be shoehorned into some reviewer\u2019s preconceived notion of stylistic categories.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m guilty as charged of said pigeonholing, and I make no apologies. I see part of my responsibility (to anyone who reads my reviews) as being a sort of consumer guide. You, gentle reader, are too busy to sift through the endless stream of new music that is created daily. (Hell, so am I.) By providing a signpost or two, I can (if I\u2019m successful) help you decide if a given release is worth your further investigation. The application of a label — folk-rock. prog-metal, Christian rap (okay, you won\u2019t find me writing about the last of those) — is a quick and handy device, if not overused.<\/p>\n
Way, way back in 1966, there weren\u2019t as many labels. But by virtue of their stylistic complexity, some bands forced the creation of new labels. So while The Butterfield Blues Band<\/strong>\u2019s name might have suggested one very straightforward thing to potential listeners, the music on East-West<\/em> telegraphed something much more finely nuanced. The album title was the first clue.<\/p>\n There’s plenty of straight-ahead electric blues and blues-rock here, and the approach that the BBB used on East-West<\/em> paved the way for countless bands who\u2019d come later (The Allman Brothers Band<\/strong> comes to mind). \u201cAll these Blues\u201d and \u201cGet out Of My Life, Woman\u201d are exemplars of an electrically-charged Chicago style of the blues. This was a mixed-race band, still a rarity in \u201866: Sly & the Family Stone<\/strong><\/a> and Love<\/strong> <\/a>were two of the small handful of mixed bands of that era. And that quality probably added to the musical breadth that the band was able to display.<\/p>\n East-West<\/em> would merely be an excellent album were it not for the inclusion of the title track, the last on the album (newly reissued on hybrid SACD in numbered editions). \u201cEast-West\u201d is the reason the writers had to sharpen their pencils and try and come up with a new label. Raga-jazz-blues-rock? Who the hell knows? All that\u2019s certain is that \u201cEast-West\u201d is thirteen-plus of the most exciting minutes in 1960s music, full of guitar interplay that draws as much from modal and \u201cEastern\u201d styles as it does from the blues. This album transcends, redefines the blues. East-West<\/em> is an essential part of any comprehensive music collection. If you don\u2019t already have it, pick this one up.<\/p>\n Follow \u201cthe_musoscribe\u201d on <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some people — musicians, listeners, you name it — get their nose out of joint when writers apply labels to music. How dare we, the thinking goes. The music shouldn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,42,62,64,65],"tags":[442,1907],"class_list":["post-5734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blues","category-jazz","category-rawk","category-reissue","category-review","tag-butterfield-blues-band","tag-sacd","cat-9-id","cat-42-id","cat-62-id","cat-64-id","cat-65-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/icon_twitter_small.jpg\"){kind=icon}
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