Telling the truth with blues

Bad Blood In The City was recorded in the Piety Street studios of New Orleans in 2007 and its every note spells rage and indignation. The musician who led the session is the guitarist born in St Matthews, South Carolina, in 1942, James Blood Ulmer. He sang gospel with the Southern Sons as a child, moved to Detroit and New York, en route playing with giants like Art Blakey, Larry Young, Paul Bley and Joe Henderson, before teaming up with and being mightily influenced by Ornette Coleman through the early '70s, during Colemen's funky Prime Time period.

Coleman played on Ulmer's first album Tales Of Captain Black.

In 1980 Ulmer cut his most celebrated record Are You Glad To Be In America? on British label Rough Trade.

In Bad Blood In The City, Ulmer creates a delta amalgam of jazz, Mississippi blues and black rock, stretching right back to his gospel roots and the classic blues of Bessie Smith.

His gravelly voice comes to the fore from the opening track, addressed to the survivors of the hurricane, and in the powerfully moving Katrina, his argument is not to curse nature - "Katrina ain't to blame," he declares.

Ulmer picks an acoustic guitar, David Barnes's harmonica wails accusingly and Leon Gruenbaum strides out on his piano as Ulmer points to the real criminals of Katrina.

"Katrina ran a whole lot of people out of town/When they heard that she was comin'," he observes.

Who were these? "All the richest people could not be found."

And who is to blame? "Talk to the president," repeats Ulmer.

The album moves forward with covers of songs by Willie Dixon (Dead Presidents) and Howlin' Wolf (Commit A Crime), some gospel blues (Let's Talk About Jesus), but it is a version of John Lee Hooker's This Land Is Nobody's Land that peals and growls from Ulmer's throatbox as if it were really his own. A mournful truly blues.

"I wonder why we fighting over this land," sings Ulmer, when it is in fact but "a burial ground," even though "God made this land, everybody equal, for everyone."

A refutation, consciously or unconsciously, to the narrative of burning optimism that runs through Woodie Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land.

And then there is Bessie Smith's commentary on the universal deluge that speaks too of floods everywhere, from Pakistan to Cumbria to New Orleans, the tragic beauty of her Backwater Blues, sung with a grating power by Ulmer in the times of Katrina.

"Thousands of poor people didn't have a place to go."

A heart-throbbing guitar solo, a harmonica that weeps teeming rain and Charles Burnham's lamentation on his electric violin for the flood-oppressed everywhere, as Ulmer cries out the words that Bessie sang eight decades ago: "Then they rowed a little boat about five miles 'cross the farm/I packed all my clothes, throwed 'em in and they rowed me along./Then I climbed upon some high old lonesome hill/Then looked down on the house where I used to live."

As I stare at the pictures of Sindh and Punjab in 2010, it is the same old story.

"Blues ain't no joke," growls Ulmer in The Power Of The Blues. "It brings me to my knees," he says, it makes him "cry like a baby."

But it does more, he asserts, for those who sing and hearken to the blues can also "use the concept of the blues to find our way around" through life like an earthy guide.

No more so in the album's final song Old Slave Master, cut when Bush Jnr was still in maximum power.

With a romping rhythmic upsurge and Ulmer coaxing his guitar to emit a huge farting sound, it is not only the president who all but ignored New Orleans during its weeks of terror and agony ("Old Slave Master, what took you so long?") but also the president leading his nation into unwinnable, ultra-murderous wars, provoking the white heat of the blues and lines of monstrous irony.

"You take us to war in a land that can't be won/Old Slave Master, what have you done?/Slavery is a whole lot of fun."

Oh, the sheer truth of the blues!