CD Review: Jeff Healey's Heal My Soul (2016)

Canadian blues-rock guitarist Jeff Healey’s death in March 2008 – just a couple weeks before the release of his excellent Mess of Blues album – launched a slow-burning reappraisal of the musician’s career. There have been a slew of posthumous releases since Healey’s tragic death at the tender age of 41 years, most of them live recordings or patchwork quilts of live and studio material. Some albums have been authorized by Healey’s estate (i.e. his wife Cristie), but others have not. Heal My Soul is an estate-authorized collection personally curated by producer Roger Costa, in whose capable hands the guitarist’s legacy has been placed.

The back story goes like this – during the last few years of the Jeff Healey Band in the late 1990s, the guitarist wrote and recorded up a storm, creating and archiving better than three dozen songs in a blues-rock vein before dropping out of the major label rat-race to pursue his other passion, old-school jazz music. Although thirteen songs from this tsunami of creativity were releases in 2000 as Get Me Some, the rest of the treasure has sat, untouched, in the archive for almost two decades. Costa culled a dozen of Healey’s best performances, restoring and remixing the original master tapes into Heal My Soul. In doing so, Costa removed any period-specific sounds to better emphasize Healey’s enormous talents, the results sometimes shocking but never unpleasing...

Jeff Healey’s Heal My Soul

Although Healey’s softer side may be represented further down the album, Heal My Soul kicks off with the explosive “Daze of the Night,” a blues-metal styled track written with Marti Frederiksen and featuring clamorous rhythms, roaring vocals, and molten licks that would sound perfectly at home on any Clutch LP. Healey fronts a traditional power trio here comprised of his former JHB compatriot Joe Rockman (bass) and drummer Dean Glover, which are featured on most of these songs. Healey’s vox rage surprisingly across the track, his high-flying solos soaring above the same ballpark as, say, Randy Rhodes or Jake E. Lee (both former Ozzy fretburners, BTW). It’s a mighty strong performance, and one that will have you looking at Mr. Healey in an entirely different light.

Costa does a masterful job of arranging the sequencing here to keep things interesting, and the party rolls on with “Moodswing,” written by the Toronto-based songwriting collective known as The Phantoms. The song is a rockin’ bit o’ blues-tinged metal-flake that takes the guitarist out of his comfort zone but proves that Healey could shred the steel strings with the best of them. Rather than the blizzard of notes that boxed a listener’s ears on “Daze of the Night,” Healey’s reading of “Moodswing” proffers a darker ambiance, his screeching solos showing a hint of psychedelic madness that is matched by noisy rhythms and, well…‘moody’ vocals that lean in a blues direction, if you know what I mean...

I Misunderstood

By contrast, “Baby Blue” is the sort of acoustic ballad that helped win Healey a mainstream audience, and he delivers a beautiful performance here, his elegant but subdued fretwork dazzling alongside his rich, multi-tracked vocals and harmonies. Healey does a magnificent job interpreting Richard Thompson’s somber “I Misunderstood,” his vocals dropping into a lower register to mimic the British guitarist’s heartbreaking lyrical voice. Unlike Thompson’s original take, though, which appeared on 1991’s Rumor and Sigh album, Healey channels his own personal emotions through his fingers, bringing an eerie vibe to the guitar lines and making the song his own even while paying tribute to its writer.

“Please,” co-written with fellow six-string maniac Stevie Salas, is another red-hot wildfire, Healey delivering the vocals with a sense of urgency missing among the previous songs. His bluesy, hard-rocking performance shows that he missed his calling – although we blues fans have long respected Healey’s six-string talents, he could have jumped into the hard rock/metal fray and become a true “Guitar God,” putting suckers like Joe Satriani and Steve Vai to shame with the soulfulness inherent in his playing. That said, “Please” is a helluva song, a wall-to-wall sonic assault that will leave you gasping for air and hungry for more.

All The Saints

Firmly back on familiar ground, “Temptation” is the sort of Delta-bred blues jam that Healey has always excelled at; the performance here is pumped up on steroids, with jagged guitar licks reverberating off the kudzu vine while crashing drumbeats capture the rhythms of the swamp these deep blues were born in. Again, this is Jeff Healey as you’ve seldom heard him before, his stunning guitarplay a revelation, slyly mixing hard-times blues with sharp-edged hard rock to create a truly dangerous sound. Although there’s still a familiar six-string Sturm und Drang running as an undercurrent beneath the poppier “Kiss The Ground You Walk On,” the song’s vocal harmonies and plaintive vocals could have earned Healey a 1990s-era radio hit if it had been released.  

With sparse instrumentation and Healey’s filigree guitar, “All The Saints” is a hauntingly beautiful performance that places the spotlight on the guitarist’s expressive vocals, which are often overshadowed by his instrumental prowess. The guitar strum is elevated by Healey’s imaginative playing, his emotional vox offering a window to the singer’s soul. Rhythm guitarist Phillip Sayce joins in on “Put The Shoe On The Other Foot,” a funky, strutting bit of R&B swagger that evinces no little energy but lots of instrumental chops. Heal My Soul closes out with the surprising “It’s The Last Time,” a twang-tinged slice of pop-country that dresses up the blues in Nashville finery to fine effect. Healey’s fluid guitar lines bridge the gap between Hank Williams and Robert Johnson, channeling the sad-eyed ghosts of love-gone-wrong in what should have been another massive radio hit for the star-crossed artist.

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Because Jeff Healey dabbled in so many musical idioms – pop, rock, blues, old timey jazz – his handful of recordings tend to run the gamut of style and expression. Heal My Soul provides a little of something for almost every Healey fan, no matter what genre and era of the guitarist’s work you may adore. The album offers up a few pleasant surprises and a lot that’s comfortably familiar, with Healey’s charismatic presence, wonderful guitar tone, and timeless talent dominating the grooves. Most of all, the album captures Healey playing as he wanted to play, without label or management interference, the guitarist clearly reveling in the sheer joy of the songs.

If Heal My Soul ends up being the last of Healey’s posthumous releases, he’ll have gone out on a high note; if not, it’s certainly one hell of a collection that displays the man’s enormous – and often overlooked talents – in the very best light. There’s literally nothing I don’t like here, and that’s the highest praise I can give. Grade: A+ (Provogue Records, released March 25, 2016)

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Stony Plain Records celebrates 40 years!

Our friends at Alligator Records aren’t the only label to achieve a significant milestone in 2016 – Canada’s Stony Plain Records, as fine a roots ‘n’ blues imprint as you’ll find on this spinning green globe – is celebrating four decades in the biz this year with the release of a special three-CD set. On June 3rd, 2016 the label will release 40 Years of Stony Plain, the ambitious compilation offering 35 deep cuts from Stony Plain’s storied history of album releases on two CDs as well as a third, twelve-track disc of rarities and previously-unreleased tracks from the archives.

The three CDs of 40 Years of Stony Plain are broken down by theme, the first disc offering material from singer/songwriters like Colin Linden, Ian Tyson, Doug Sahm, Emmylou Harris, Corb Lund, Steve Earle, and Rodney Crowell, among others. Disc two is comprised of “blues, R&B, gospel, swing, jazz, and even more” with songs by talents like Jeff Healey, Jim Byrnes, Amos Garrett, Ruthie Foster, Joe Louis Walker, Rory Block, and Long John Baldry, to name but a few. The third rarities disc is really juicy, offering rare and/or unreleased performances by the great Duke Robillard, Maria Muldaur, Eric Bibb, and David Wilcox. The set also includes a rare track by legendary blues harpist Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton, performing with Hot Cottage on “Shakey’s Edmonton Blues.”  

“Celebrating Stony Plain’s 40th Anniversary by putting together this specially priced three CD set has been a joy,” label founder and president Holger Petersen states in a press release for 40 Years of Stony Plain. “Not only going back over those years and selecting some of our favorite tracks, but to also dig deeper to find rare and previously unreleased material by old friends Eric Bibb, Duke Robillard, Maria Muldaur, David Wilcox, the late Bob Carpenter, Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton and the legendary Sam Chatmon and His Barbeque Boys from 1979. With extensive notes and packaging, this stunning collection of 47 songs will be a joyful surprise for true music fans everywhere.”

Formed by Petersen in 1976, Stony Plain Records has released over 400 albums to date, earning the Canadian label a handful of Grammy® nominations and a slew of accolades in their home country, including eleven Juno Awards and 20 Maple Blues Awards. The Blues Foundation in Memphis, Tennessee named Stony Plain as the 2014 label of the year, and Holger Petersen as the broadcaster of the year in 2008 for his work over 30 years as the host of the Saturday Night Blues program, broadcast weekly across Canada by CBS Radio. Petersen has also served as the host of the weekly Natch’l Blues program on CKUA radio for 47 years. A true inspiration to roots ‘n’ blues fans worldwide, Holger Petersen’s love of music has benefited us all. Congrats to Stony Plain Records for 40 great years!

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CD Review: Jeff Healey's The Best of the Stony Plain Years (2015)

Singer, songwriter, and guitarist extraordinaire Jeff Healey wore many faces. To casual music fans, he was the singer of the hit “Angel Eyes,” a pop-blues artist who scored Top 30 albums in 1988’s See The Light and 1990’s Hell To Pay with the Jeff Healey Band. To blues fans, Healey was a solo artist, the expressive guitarist behind albums like Mess of Blues and Songs From The Road, which represented both his studio and on-stage faces, both released after Healey’s tragic death in 2008. 

There was another side to Jeff Healey, however, a face known mostly to the hardcore faithful – that of the jazz master. Blind since childhood, Healey never allowed his lack of eyesight to stop him from enjoying life to its fullest. A rabid record collector with tens of thousands of 78s, Healey was a fan of 1920s and ‘30s-era American jazz, a style he pursued with gusto on a handful of albums like 2002’s Among Friends and 2004’s Adventures In Jazzland, recorded with his band the Jazz Wizards.

Truthfully, Jeff Healey was all these faces and more, an artist of many talents that may not have been a household name, but was adored by his fans and respected by the peers that he played alongside, artists like Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy, Walter Trout, to name a few. 

The Best of the Stony Plain Years

There has been a glut of posthumous Healey releases over the past seven years, some authorized, many of dodgy provenance, most of them derived from live performances – an atmosphere in which Healey typically flourished. The compilation album The Best of the Stony Plain Years gathers a dozen of the guitarist’s underrepresented jazz-oriented performances from those albums that he recorded between 2002 and 2008 for the Canadian label, featuring Healey on vocals, guitar, and the occasional trumpet, backed by a crackerjack band that included talents like bassist Colin Bray, pianist Reide Kaiser, and clarinetist Ross Wooldridge.

Healey’s The Best of the Stony Plain Years offers up the guitarist playing music for the sheer joy of playing. The dozen songs here will be familiar to any 21st century jazz aficionado, and there are some big names behind the music – legends like Eddie Lang, Hoagy Carmichael, and Shelton Brooks, among others. Healey’s take on the originals tends to slant towards the traditional, and there’s no hiding his enthusiasm on tracks like the classic “Three Little Worlds,” which offers up an energetic vocal performance, or “The Wild Cat,” a rollicking instrumental with machine-gun guitar pickin’, blasts of horn, and a screeching violin. Hoagy Carmichael’s “Star Dust” is a classic from the American songbook, and Healey acquits himself nicely with wistful vocals and elegant fretwork.

There are times when jazz and the blues intersect, and Healey is quite adept at those moments as well, Shelton Brooks’ “Some of These Days” concealing a bluesy undercurrent beneath the brave façade of the lyrics and Healey’s filigree guitarplay. The standard “Sweet Georgia Brown” has been recorded many times since its origin in 1925, and Healey leans heavier towards the hallowed Cab Calloway version than any others, right down to the abstract vocals. “Sing You Sinners” is a scorching slice of vintage New Orleans barrelhouse that features British music legend Chris Barber while Carmichael’s exotic “Hong Kong Blues” provides a bit of Asian flavor in its unusual syncopated rhythm, but Healey’s warm vocals and six-string gymnastics can’t help but bring a contemporary edge to the song.        

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

While The Best of the Stony Plain Records stands entirely on its own, fans of Healey’s major label era work may be better suited looking for a mainstream release like The Master Hits collection. Those who prefer Healey in his role as guitar-slinging bluesman might find Live At Grossman’s 1994 to their liking. However, both groups – if they’re willing to experiment and listen with open ears – might find much to like in the jaunty throwback jazz of Jeff Healey’s The Best of the Stony Plain Years. Grade: B (Stony Plain Records, released July 17, 2015)

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