Like peanut butter and jelly, so is the Hammond B3 and shufflin’ blues. This album has B3er Mike LeDonne grooving hard with a boogie-ing quartet of Eric Alexander/ts, Peter Bernstein/g and Joe Farnsworth/dr as well as with a big band that adds the likes of Steve Wilson-Jim Snidero/as, Jon Faddis/tp and Steve Davis/tb, all under the baton of Dennis Mackrel. Rev up your engines!
With the big band, the team hits like Sonny Liston with a funky big punch as Alexander swaggers on the title tune and gets Coltranesque on the tricky charts of “Matador” with Bernstein searing through the avalanche. They also do a hip blues shuffle on the groovy “Rock With You” with the sections getting frantic during “Bags and Brown.” In the smaller setting, Bernstein and Alexander sizzle on “Blues For Jed” with the tenorist getting breathy on the soft fog of “Still”. Relentless fun.