Little Axe's 'Hard Grind' well received
Little Axe's third album 'Hard Grind' has been very well received by the music press world wide. The album is part of the relaunch of Adrian Sherwood's famous On-U Sound label.
Little Axe's third album Hard Grind has been very well received by the music press world wide. The album is part of the relaunch of Adrian Sherwood's famous On-U Sound label and has been released in the US by the American blues label Fat Possum. You can check out the track Outsider with On-U Sound and One Drop Blues on the Fat Possum site or check out the awesome Little Axe dub selector.
Little Axe just finished a small European tour and performed on the Womad Festival in the UK, July 26th. You can check out a recording of the gig the band did in June on the New Forms Festival in The Hague (The Netherlands), courtesy of Vpro Radio. Unfortunately the quality is very poor.
Hard Grind is of course once more a cooperation of Skip 'Little Axe' McDonald and his Tackhead mates Keith LeBlanc, Doug Wimbish and Adrian Sherwood. Other participants on Hard Grind are Skip's son Jayme (vocals), Bim Sherman (vocals), Ghetto Priest (backing vocals) and Carlton 'Bubblers' Ogilvie (keyboards, melodica, backing vocals).
Little Axe have just finished a small European tour with gigs in London, The Hague, Tilburg and Brussels. Sadly the gig in Paris was cancelled at the last moment. Little Axe will be playing the Womad Festival in the UK, end of July and hope to do some more gigs then.
Little Axe performed with Skip McDonald on guitar, Keith LeBlanc on drums and Adrian Sherwood attacking the crowd with massive dubs and effects from behind the control tower (of course). It would have been a Tackhead reunion with Doug Wimbish on bass, but since he's recording a new album with Living Colour he wasn't able to make it.
Jayme McDonald replaced him on the bass most of the time. Chris, the second guitarist, also payed some bass. Nick Riggio from Toledo warmed up the crowd with a DJ set and played keyboards during the gigs, that featured a lot of tracks from the new album.
Hard Grind is an excursion through the wetlands of the blues, like Wolf that House Built and Slow Fuse, but it's more 'druggy' says Adrian Sherwood, who is very pleased with the end result of the long awaited third album. Hard Grind is darker than the first two Little Axe albums and is less song orientated. That's probably why it has to grow on you, but with every time you hear it, Hard Grind gets better and better.
Skip Mcdonald once said: "Little Axe is all about being a small part of a very big thing", explaining his relationship to blues tradition. "It's about continuity. The blues is everywhere in gospel music, in dub, in tabla music." He could have added bluegrass, jazz, funk, rock and hip hop. "They're all blues", he said, but "blues with different stylistic parameters, not confined to the geography of the Mississippi delta and twelve-bar structure. I want to leave gates open."
McDonald's personal journey has taken him from the steel mills of Ohio, where his father was an after-hours blues picker, to New York and the Sugar Hill House Band, in which he first connected with fellow axemen Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc on the mighty grooves to White Lines and The Message.
Then there was Tackhead, the transatlantic hook-up with deptford dub maestro Adrian Sherwood, a partnership that endured and gave rise in 1995 to the first Little Axe album, Wolf That House Built featured in just about every critic's top ten for the year, to be followed by Slow Fuse in 1996.
That's the past. The present is Hard Grind, continuing Skip's mission to make 'blues for the 21st century'.
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