Boss of the Blues

In early 1956, Big Joe Turner took a break from his duties as one of the stars of the emerging music called rock & roll to hook up with an eight-piece band--including his longtime cohort, boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson--to make an album of the Kansas City jazz he'd helped advance as a blues shouter in the '30s. Most of the material on The Boss of the Blues is from the Turner-Johnson songbook, with "Roll 'Em Pete," "Cherry Red," and "Piney Brown Blues" among the bedrock pieces of the form. Their treatment here is vigorous and swinging, but the best cut may be a long, blowzy version of "Wee Baby Blues" that sounds as much at home in today's late-night bars as Turner's work did in those of the era in which it was made. --Rickey Wright