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| SONNY LANDRETH STRUTS HIS STUFF ON GRANT STREET SLIDE GUITAR LEGEND TORCHES BAYOU BLUES/ROCK WITH 'LIVE' TRIO CD Nashville, Tenn. (January 13, 2005) - Slide guitar legend and Sugar Hill recording artist Sonny Landreth releases his first live album on January 25. Grant Street is the followup to 2003’s Grammy-nominated The Road We’re On and presents eleven incendiary, take-no-prisoners stompers featuring Landreth’s blazing chops driven by the high-octane rhythm section of bassist David Ranson and all-world tub-thumper Kenny Blevins. Recorded on Landreth’s home turf at Lafayette, Louisiana’s earthy Grant Street Dancehall, Grant Street puts the ax-wielder’s chops on the block -- up-front and on fire in a non-stop, dizzying torrent of jaw-dropping riffs, gut-bucket blues and low-down boogaloo. The album revisits and assaults self-penned gems from Landreth’s critically-acclaimed, if still woefully overlooked, catalogue and unveils three brand-spanking-new songs -- "Port Of Calling," "Wind In Denver," and "Pedal To The Metal". Ain’t no ‘slow-dancers’ here, folks -- this is pure, flat-out shredding from a major-league cat whose trickbag knows no bounds. It’s the perfect time for Landreth to release his first live album – the previous year was his most triumphant and diverse year of performing. Sonny not only took a spotlight during the Clapton Crossroads Festival last summer, but also at the prestigious Festival International de Jazz de Montreal, The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and a headlining tour of Japan featuring Ike Turner’s Kings Of Rhythm. His signature sound was tapped for collaborations with many artists including helming the revival of John Hiatt’s famed band, The Goners, and playing a pivotal role with Gov’t Mule for their most recent live album and DVD, The Deepest End. Landreth also hooked up with Jimmy Buffett for two nights at Fenway Park and added his distinctive guitar work to Buffett’s newest hit album, License to Chill. Grant Street is a guitar album, first and foremost. The songs are merely trampolines upon which Landreth vaults, whirls and spins, and Ranson and Blevins are there to stoke the fires. A bona fide "musician’s musician," Landreth’s fluid, inventive six-string magic has illuminated countless recordings by such revered, eclectic artists as John Hiatt, Mark Knopfler, Bobby Charles, Marshall Crenshaw, John Mayall, Jerry Douglas, Dolly Parton, Junior Wells and Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown. Mr. Eric Clapton is stone in love with Landreth’s idiosyncratic approach to the slide guitar, which incorporates a variety of groundbreaking techniques via both the fretting and picking hands. The erstwhile guitar ‘god’ (who generally tosses out bouquets as easily as if they were manhole covers) has called Sonny "probably the most underestimated musician on the planet and also probably one of the most advanced." |
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| When it comes to Sonny Landreth, even Eric Clapton is a fan. "He’s probably the most underestimated musician on the planet and also probably one of the most advanced," he says. Within the last year, Landreth performed at Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas, the Festival International de Jazz de Montreal, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. He recently performed with Jimmy Buffett at Fenway Park and appears on Buffett’s first number one album, License to Chill. Landreth also received a long overdue nod with a Grammy Award nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Recording for his seventh album, The Road We’re On, released on Sugar Hill Records. Grant Street, Landreth’s latest effort for Sugar Hill, finds the slide guitar master on his first live recording and back at his old haunt in Lafayette, Louisiana. "Making this album was a homecoming," Landreth says of the 2003 recording. When Grant Street Dancehall opened its doors on the Fourth of July in 1980, Landreth performed with both bands that evening - Red Beans & Rice Revue and the king of zydeco, Clifton Chenier. It was the beginning of a long history with the converted fruit warehouse. "For the first time, I got the opportunity to open shows or hang out with a lot of my heroes, like Ray Charles, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Son Seals, and John Hammond Jr. Those were powerful shows and great times. I wanted to tap into that for this live album." With Grant Street, Landreth returns to that well of inspiration and captures Lafayette’s unique vibe while showcasing his trio with Dave Ranson on bass and Kenneth Blevins on drums. Ranson and Landreth met in junior high and have been working together since Landreth’s 1981 record, Blues Attack. Blevins joined the two in 1987, forming The Goners, John Hiatt’s backing band for the Bring The Family, Slow Turning. Hiatt’s 2003 Beneath This Gruff Exterior is his first album to be billed as John Hiatt & The Goners. Since the early 90s, Landreth has had a yearly gig at Grant Street in April for Festival International in Lafayette. "This album is more about catching the kind of spontaneity that only happens in the heat of the moment." And he couldn’t have picked a hotter place to record Grant Street. Even in April, with air-conditioning and a dozen industrial fans, the club has a reputation for a hot atmosphere, even hotter music, and cold beer. "Although I love having special guests sit in with us, this time I decided to document our band as it is every night on the road," Landreth says. "Also, the trio format gives me the space to focus on the slide guitar thing." Landreth’s unique approach of combining the slide with fretted notes is legendary. More than just laying down licks, his fingerpicking technique creates a complex, multi-layered sound onstage. Grant Street was recorded over the course of two nights and captures the energy of the crowd, the clinking of beer bottles, and even the pounding of barstools on the cypress dance floor to lure Landreth and company back onstage for an encore. "It had to be raw and real with no overdubs. I didn’t want to rerecord our parts in the studio afterwards. Everything that’s on there happened on those two nights." Landreth enlisted the help of his longtime collaborators R.S. Field and Grammy Award-winning engineer Tony Daigle to produce Grant Street. The album features over an hour of Landreth’s original music dating back to Blues Attack, with three previously unreleased titles, and a 10-minute version of his Louisiana anthem, "Congo Square." For more than 30 years, Landreth has penned his own poignant songs, drawn from his south Louisiana roots and the area’s rich storytelling tradition. "This one is for the fans, "Landreth says. "I deeply appreciate them. If it wasn’t for their support, I wouldn’t be able to take the band out on the road." And for those who haven’t heeded Clapton’s testimony to Landreth’s talent and soul, Grant Street is sure to convert them into true believers. |
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| "...a blistering new live album. With Mr. Landreth's guitar at their center, the songs carry bar-band music to a higher evolutionary plane. He knows all the old methods of the slide-guitar blues: the lunging chords, the dialogues of low plunks and high keening notes, the wailing, wriggling, vocalistic long lines. But he has another tier of techniques as well. There are chords that chime, dance atop the beat, mutate in midair or huff like a harmonica. There are fast-picked overtones that arrive like a tuned hailstorm and gutsy nuances of distortion and feedback. The effects can be startling, but they're never gratuitous. They are the sounds of a musician who has deeply investigated his instrument without leaving his roots." Jon Pareles, NEW YORK TIMES “This electric slide guitarist is a Louisiana man with a British fan club that includes Richard Thompson and Eric Clapton. This is why. A power-trio blast cut live in 2004 during Landreth's annual spring fling at a Lafayette dance hall, Grant Street is crawfish Cream, peppered with zydeco snap, that will have you booking a table for this year.” David Fricke, ROLLING STONE "Just as Muhammad Ali once boasted that he could "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," Louisiana's Sonny Landreth can make his slide guitar roar like a rocket ship and dance like a ballerina...a dynamic propulsion that threatens to levitate this Lafayette dancehall." AMAZON.COM "...sonic firewater that sounds like three different instruments being played simultaneously... every other contender to the throne have a long way to go until they can legitmately challenge King Sonny's position at the top of the slide heap." HARP MAGAZINE "Landreth’s slide-guitar playing is beyond brilliant – it’s singular. There is no player alive who can match the finesse and fire he brings to the slide." BILLBOARD "No one blends Cajun grooves and Delta slide like Sonny Landreth. Whether digging into a bouncy two-beat rhythm or laying down a loping rub shuffle, he makes his Strat wheeze and sing." GUITAR PLAYER "Album after album, Landreth continues to boggle minds and drop jaws with his supremely agile, incredibly tasteful slide-guitar skills." SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS "Landreth’s unique fretting-behind-the-slide technique conjures up the otherworldly sound that’s his trademark – and it sounds fresher than ever on The Road We’re On." GAMBIT WEEKLY "Lafayette native Sonny Landreth is such a master of his instrument – arguably the most exciting slide guitarist alive, at least in terms of sheer innovation – that it’s easy to forget what a master assimilator he is, too, effortlessly combining blues, zydeco, Cajun, rock and R&B into a distinctive style that’s nearly impossible to describe but easy to understand." OFFBEAT "...stellar songwriter and exceptionally soulful slide guitarist and singer." COLUMBUS DISPATCH "Sonny Landreth is probably the most underestimated musician on the planet and also probably one of the most advanced." ERIC CLAPTON "To watch Landreth live is to see someone who has entirely mastered his instrument." WASHINGTON POST "Sonny Landreth is a songwriting craftsman who gives us clever, emotionally truthful little bits of hook-filled roots rock. He’s also one of America’s most talented guitarists. One admission charge, two talents." NO DEPRESSION "Landreth is truly great. He has a unique slant on slide-guitar playing, in that he has come up with some different tunings and ways of playing that give him his own voice." WARREN HAYNES NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Hear: Sonny Landreth "Grant Street" (Sugar Hill) Sonny Landreth's slide guitar has the sly expression of a human voice. In his slippery runs up and down the fret board, Landreth evokes the sound of growls, giggles, leers, confessions and cries - the perfect range of sounds for the blues, his chosen genre. You can hear the veteran ax man capture all those emotions on his latest, a live album. It features Landreth's three-man power trio playing a club he has periodically popped into since the start of his career in the 1970s. In the cut "Z. Rider," Landreth rips through the riffs with a serrated edge. In "All About You," he struts with a boogie-woogie swagger, while in "Native Stepson," he shows off his sensitive side. Landreth has played with many musicians over the years, from Clifton Chenier to John Hiatt. But his own albums offer the best showcase for his forceful singing - and for guitar work so evocative it could front any record by itself. Jim Farber NEW YORK TIMES Making the Strings Sing Every Way They Can Even without hearing Sonny Landreth's slide guitar, watching his hands would show a virtuoso at work. When he led his trio at the B. B. King Blues Club on Tuesday night, Mr. Landreth plucked notes with his thumb, fingers and a pick, or tickled the strings with a wiggling finger. He hit the strings with a closed fist and stroked them with an open palm. He strummed with choppy strokes, clawed the strings or let his hand hover in a trembling blur. That was just his right hand: his left was forming notes with slide and fingers, swooping up and down the neck, tapping precise notes or grabbing and bending them. And the sounds were even better than the view. Mr. Landreth and his band members, Dave Ranson on bass and Kenneth Blevins on drums, come from the bayou country around Lafayette, La., although they have covered a lot of mileage both on their own and as John Hiatt's backup band, the Goners. Mr. Landreth writes songs with bar-band titles like "Blues Attack" and "Pedal to Metal," and they are still Louisiana bar-band music. They are rooted in blues, zydeco, New Orleans mambo and the Celtic modes of Acadian music; Mr. Landreth sings in a swamp-rock moan about a two-timing lover or trailer park called the Promised Land, with pain, humor and rowdiness. The band's shuffles and boogies would have been dance music if the club had a dance floor. No doubt they are in Lafayette, where Mr. Landreth recorded much of the same set for a blistering new live album, "Grant Street" (Sugar Hill). With Mr. Landreth's guitar at their center, the songs carry bar-band music to a higher evolutionary plane. He knows all the old methods of the slide-guitar blues: the lunging chords, the dialogues of low plunks and high keening notes, the wailing, wriggling, vocalistic long lines. But he has another tier of techniques as well. There are chords that chime, dance atop the beat, mutate in midair or huff like a harmonica. There are fast-picked overtones that arrive like a tuned hailstorm and gutsy nuances of distortion and feedback. The effects can be startling, but they're never gratuitous. They are the sounds of a musician who has deeply investigated his instrument without leaving his roots. Jon Pareles |
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