Eureka Springs Blues Party: Hudspeth & Taylor Live at Gotahold Brewing

Description

"Kimuziki - Live In Des Moines, the new album from Hudspeth & Taylor (and their first live release), strips the blues to its core while taking it down new roads. Brandon Hudspeth's crystalline guitar work is the perfect complement to Jaisson Taylor's multi-octave vocals and ever-expanding myriad of percussion instruments. With both men essentially co-anchoring the proceedings, they breathe new depth and dimension into six classics from the past 100 years of the blues canon, along with new renderings of three originals culled from their first two albums. ""I had been thinking about doing a live album,"" Taylor notes, ""but I've really been focused on writing for another studio record. At the same time, I also felt like we needed to get something out there now because it can take a while to record and finish an album."" ""We didn't know the show was being recorded, but when we heard it we knew we had something special,"" adds Hudspeth. Working together for nearly two decades, their sound has continuously evolved over time, as Taylor relates. ""We started out with an electric guitar and a regular drum set, but there were times when people thought we were too loud for a room so we went acoustic."" Hudspeth colors his sound in different ways, using resurrected 70+ year old pickups “like Lightning Hopkins and Elmore James used to use,” he notes. Taylor's array of percussion, centered around multiple cajons, is ever-changing. ""I have a lot of tools in the toolbox, if you will. We try to not stray too far from the blues, but the older blues musicians were not afraid to add things like a Latin beat so that gives us some license to stretch. Music, in general, is basically borrowing from what's happened before and trying to expand on it; we both have always just kind of naturally done that. There's just two of us, so we try to make it interesting."" Over the course of nine tracks that sizzle and shimmer with polyrhythmic syncopation, Brandon Hudspeth and Jaisson Taylor never lose sight of the blues. If anything, they take the music closer to its roots while also taking it further into the future. Kimuziki, the word, is Swahili for musical: Kimuziki, the album, makes it an experience."