Hugo Race and Michelangelo Russo
John Lee Hooker's World Today

Hugo Race is one of those musicians who over the years has never denied in his compositions what have been his great models and in particular, more than others, has always looked to the giants of delta blues, whom he has variously paid tribute to throughout his career. In this sense, what I mean is that in the end he has reached his own style which, although derivative, is nonetheless peculiar and always and in any case makes him recognizable as a musician and performer. Understandable in this case and on this basis, that an operation like this could sooner or later become one of the chapters of his discographic production.

'John Lee Hooker's World Today', released via Glitterhouse and Gustaff Records on May 19, 2017, is rightly a tribute album to John Lee Hooker and his characteristic boogie, created by Hugo Race in combination with one of his long-time collaborators, Michelangelo Russo, a member of the Fatalists and with Hugo since the days of the True Spirits.

The album was recorded in a day and a half in Berlin and contains eight songs. Eight covers with a minimum duration of six minutes and up to almost ten minutes for the opening track 'Hobo Blues'. This choice, to expand spaces and times, can be seen in the direction of paying homage to those typical atmospheres of Hooker's music rather than merely performing the tracks, a kind of 'technique' that Hugo Race has variously used in his solo production and also in the case of some reinterpretations like the super classic 'John The Revelator'.

Reinterpreted with the aid of an essential instrumentation, guitars, stomp-box, harmonica, and with the typical use of a lot of reverb and echo, John Lee Hooker's classics find a new life in this dimension and resonate again from the depths of the Mississippi waters today, sixteen years after Hooker's death. However, the feeling is not exactly that of a series of covers proposed in sequence one after the other, but rather of a long session that has something sacred and devotional about it, like the tribute that we all, as music listeners and rock and roll enthusiasts, owe to a giant who was among the first to innovate in the use of the electric guitar in the genre and, like few others, had inside that great 'melancholy', that great void inside that we call blues, and that only songs like his can fill.