Music / americana
Review: Brooks Williams & Keith Warmington
If you’re not one of those dead-eyed enthusiasts there’s a risk that listening to The Blues can be a fairly unrewarding experience, repetitive and formulaic in a way that only those dead-eyed fans could be comforted by. This is especially true of the electric post-Chicago style co-opted by Messrs Clapton et al but can equally happen in the more folksy acoustic setting of the country blues. If picking a nicely eclectic and varied set list, therefore, was just the first sign that the Williams/Warmington duo was a cut above then the way they arranged the tunes and the way they played them more than confirmed them as a fine meeting of musical minds who genuinely know their stuff.
Opening with the traditional Deep River Blues, Brooks hit an intricate Doc Watson picking style on his acoustic guitar leaving Keith to warble deft harmonica comments behind the easy-rolling vocals. On a stiflingly hot night this was effortlessly done and no sweat was broken, even when he shifted to a three-string cigar box guitar for the grinding Sitting On Top of the World with its remorseless bass line recalling North African gnawa music as much as the Mississippi Sheiks. The same instrument played on My Babe somehow caught the Hamburg cellar ambience of the early Beatles, not least thanks to Keith’s resonant and melodically straightforward harp.
Brooks’ third guitar was a beautiful sounding wooden-bodied National resonator, heard to amazing effect on Blind Boy Fuller’s Weeping Willow and a stunning dobro-blues arrangement of Amazing Grace, the latter coaxing a sublime melodic variation from Keith’s harmonica. There were original songs, too, including the Richard Thompsonesque motorbiking epic My Turn Now and the flamenco-flaying Jokers Wild which led to a broken string that gave Keith the opportunity for his mordant solo version of Another Man Done Gone. Things rounded off with Statesboro Blues – in tribute to Brook’s home town in Georgia – and an encore of the Grateful Dead’s Friend of the Devil that took us back to the no-sweat baseline and launched us into the cooling evening.
Somewhere in the evening we’d broken for food – delicious rich and smoky Texan chilli dishes cooked by Barny Haughton – that added nicely to the down home easiness of this event, but overall (and for all their apparently relaxed demeanour) it was the versatility and virtuosity of the two players that stood out. In their four respectful hands The Blues is clearly far from being dead-eyed.
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