Sweet Showers of Rain

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The most unexpected circumstances can lead you to a great record you'd never find otherwise. I was flipping through one of those slick airline magazines on a recent flight home from Stockholm, and read a thumbnail review of something called 'Sweet Showers of Rain' by a Norwegian named Knut Reiersrud. Sounded interesting, so I found myself a copy soon as we touched down. Am I glad I did.

Guitarist Reiersrud, who apparently has dabbled in a variety of different styles, assembles here a terrific blues-funk band, supplements it with electronics and turntables, and allows himself to wallow in old "race" recordings, sampling the voices and sounds from folks like Lightning Slim, Howling Wolf, Southern chain-gang chants and Baptist Bible-thumpers (and that's just on the first track). Most of the tracks are originals, complemented by two traditional tunes and a Van McCoy cover ("Giving Up", featuring a wrenching guitar solo by Reiersrud). The CD even features - saints alive! - an actual protest song, "Epitaph", a searing indictment of George Dubya's enthusiasm for capital punishment. These and the rest of the original lyrics sung by Reiersrud have been penned by (American?) Jeff Wasserman, who is definitely a man with a gift.

It's an altogether great funk record (the title track just blows the listener away), nodding both back toward the seventies with all its electric piano hooks and to the present digital day's "e-jazz" by the likes of St. Germaine (who also employed Howling Wolf to extraordinary effect). And it's a great blues record; "A Loving Disaster" sounds like a heavily-amplified Band, while the traditional "Motherless Children (Have a Hard Time)" is utterly transformed (not at the cost of its essential pathos) by churning, programmed percussion, sheets of electronic sound and sitar breaks.

A brilliant, sensitive and innovative tribute to the global breadth and appeal of the musical heritage of African America. Deserves to be discovered by a far larger audience than those flying SAS.